摘要
本文考察了十五种语言的例子,从生成语法的角度探讨以前的研究尚未解答的有关使役句的若干类型学问题。中心内容是,使役句的类型完全由使役义的两个义项,即“致使”和“实施行为或过程”,在不同语言中的表达方式来决定的。这包括语音、形态和句法的方式以及三者的搭配。考察侧重汉语,希望对类似研究有启发。
While it is well known that causativity contains two separate sememes: 'to cause' and 'to execute an action or a process'. how exactly the sememes are realized in morphology and syntax across languages has been an ongoing topic of intense research for decades. The current study looks into the issue from a generative grammar perspective with data from fifteen languages. It argues that. firstly, the grammatical case alternation on the Causee NP goes hand in hand with the speaker's intent 'to cause' something to happen. Secondly. both lexical and morphological causatives command a sim- ple accusative structure, for the straightforward reason that they mirror each other by containing both sememes in a lexical item, i. e. a lexical causative represents causativity by arbitrary sounds, and a morphological causative by morphemes. Thirdly. when the 'to cause' sememe is represented by an in- dependent word, i. e. the so-called causative light verb, we have a periphrastic structure, which may display varied surface word orders, when the light verb is in a null form. or it is an affix attached to an auxiliary. The existence of the latter form suggests that a causative affix cannot enter in syntax on its own. thus providing strong evidence against Baker's (1988) analysis of syntactic incorporation of morphological causatives, taken by some as a standard assumption. Lastly, ergative verbs universally have two argument structures, one taking an Agent and the other not, and this is the key to ambigui- ties caused by the so-called agentive and non-agentive causatives. The study draws heavily from Chi- nese data in hopes that the findings will shed light on researches of Chinese causatives themselves.
出处
《语言科学》
2004年第1期29-42,共14页
Linguistic Sciences
