| Research Abstract |
The present research project has dealt with two English construction with fake objects, i.e. the unergative intransitive resultative construction and the Way construction. It has concerned with how the semantic and syntactic representations of these constructions should be made and how their semantic arguments should be linked to their syntactic ones. Along with these investigations, this project has, as its theoretical aspect, undertaken developing a new model within the conceptual semantics, in terms of which the semantic structures of the two constructions are represented. This model incorporates Croft's (1991) notion of 'causal chain' to represent the conceptual structure of the verb.
What has been shown through this project regarding 'the causal chain model' is the following : (i) Since the thematic roles of Instrument, Means and Manner occupy intermediate positions in causation, each is represented as the first argument of an intermediate CAUSE function ; (ii) The order of occurre
… More
nce of these roles in the causal chain is Manner-Means-Instrument ; Furthermore, (iii) what differentiates these roles from each other is that whereas Instrument constitutes a non-clausal argument, Manner constitutes a clausal structure depicting a state and Means, either a non-clausal structure or a clausal one depicting an action.
The generalizations obtained on the two constructions are the following : (i) The conceptual structure of the resultative with a fake object is represented as the event structure of a 'caused-motion' with the LCS of the verb occupying its Means structure ; (ii) The entire conceptual structure of the Way construction constitutes that of 'make one's way PP', and in the case of 'means' interpretation, the LCS of the verb constitutes its Means structure while in the case of 'manner' interpretation, it is included in the Manner structure ; (iii) In the mapping of the conceptual structures to the argument structures of the two constructions, since the t of the verb has no variables, the conceptual variables of the constructions are inked to the external and internal arguments of the constructions ; (iv) Regarding the mapping of the argument structure to the D-structure, the external argument of the construction is linked to the subject of the verb, while the direct internal argument of the construction is linked to the subject of a small clause and its indirect argument, to the secondary predicate or the PP of the small clause. Less
|
