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The Syntax-Semantics Interface in the Chinese Ba-Construction The syntax-semantics interface in the Chinese ba-construction Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie am Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften der Freien Universität Berlin vorgelegt von Janna Lipenkova Berlin, April 2014 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Stefan Müller Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Walter Bisang Datum der Disputation: 15. Januar 2015 Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude goes to Stefan Müller for his support, motivation and patience in supervis- ing this thesis and for getting me involved into the science oflinguisticsinthefirstplace. Thanks to Walter Bisang for providing his support, judgementandafreshlookontheempir- ical and theoretical challenges touched upon in this text. Many thanks go to the members of the German Grammar Group at theFreeUniversityof Berlin – Philippa Cook, Felix Bildhauer, Jakob Mache, RolandSchäferandMasoodGhayoomi. Their advice and feedback helped me a great deal in diving intoandadvancingmyunderstanding of the topics relevant to the present work. I am also very indebted to Viola Auermann for her support in various and often tricky matters which disrupted the process here and then. Prof. Klaus von Heusinger offered me the possibility to spendoneyearattheSFB732of the University of Stuttgart and to uncover new perspectives and lines of research which have found their reflection in this thesis. Thanks also to my formercolleaguesfromtheUniversity of Stuttgart – Dolgor Guntsetseg, Sofiana Chiriacescu, Annika Deichsel, Jin Cui and Ljudmila Geist – for an enjoyable stay in Stuttgart and numerous interesting and inspiring discussions. Finally, I would like to thank Wang Lulu and the colleagues from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Beijing University, who were withmeduringsomeveryproduc- tive periods of writing this thesis. They offered me precioushelpwithrespecttotheempirical parts and discussed my thoughts and ideas with the critical and involved minds that only native speakers can have. ii Contents 1Thedata:baˇ-construction and related structures 7 1.1 Basic properties of the baˇ-construction . 7 1.1.1 Object preposing as the canonical form . 7 1.1.2 Argument distributions . 12 1.1.3 Syntactic flexibility in the baˇ-construction . 15 1.1.4 Grammaticalization of the baˇ-construction . 19 1.2 Related structures . 21 1.2.1 Structures that (don’t) alternate with the baˇ-construction . 21 1.2.2 Complement structures . 29 1.3 Summary .............................. 35 2Previousstudiesofthebaˇ-construction 37 2.1 Early studies . 37 2.2 The syntactic status of baˇ ...................... 40 2.2.1 Baˇ asaverb......................... 40 2.2.2 Baˇ asalightverb ...................... 48 2.2.3 Baˇ aspreposition ...................... 51 2.3 The meaning of the baˇ-construction ................ 53 2.3.1 Preliminary remarks . 53 2.3.2 Semantic constraints on the use of baˇ ........... 56 2.3.3 The contribution of the baˇ-construction . 67 iv 2.4 Summary .............................. 75 3Argumentstructureandrealization 77 3.1 Introduction . 77 3.2 The five stages of argument selection . 79 3.3 The traditional approach: semantic role lists . .... 81 3.4 Challenges for the semantic role approach . .84 3.4.1 Theoretical challenges for semantic role lists . .. 85 3.4.2 Empirical challenges . 87 3.5 Decomposition . 91 3.5.1 Feature decomposition of semantic roles . 92 3.5.2 Semantic roles as entailment clusters . 93 3.5.3 Predicate decomposition . 97 3.6 Summary .............................. 98 4Thesemanticbasisofargumentrealization 101 4.1 Description of the relevant categories . ..102 4.1.1 Aspect and situation type . 102 4.1.2 Affectedness . 105 4.1.3 Transitivity . 109 4.2 Previous theoretical work . 112 4.2.1 Tenny’s Aspectual Interface Hypothesis . 112 4.2.2 Universal properties of variable telicity verbs . ...116 4.2.3 Integrating participant structure via scales . ...117 4.2.4 Scalar change in stative predicates . 127 4.3 Summary . 128 5Thelicensingofpredicatesinthebaˇ-construction 131 5.1 The scale requirement . 132 v 5.1.1 Ontological and linguistic properties of scales . ...133 5.1.2 A typology of scales . 134 5.1.3 The linguistic specification of scales and degrees . ..135 5.2 The licensing of bare verbs in the baˇ-construction . 138 5.2.1 Discrete scale traversal . 140 5.2.2 Spreading scale traversal . 147 5.3 The licensing function of additional verbal dependents ......150 5.3.1 Types of additional verbal dependents . 151 5.3.2 Additional verbal dependent hypothesis . 158 5.3.3 Verbs that can be licensed via the AVD hypothesis . 158 5.4 Summary . 162 6TheHPSGframework 165 6.1 Basic notions and the format of description . ..167 6.1.1 Signature, formal language and theory . 167 6.1.2 Basic sign structure.....................169 6.2 The linguistic approach . 174 6.2.1 The lexicon . 174 6.2.2 The grammar . 181 6.2.3 Complex predicates and argument composition . 187 6.3 Summary . 191 7Prerequisitesfortheanalysis 193 7.1 Scalar semantics . 194 7.1.1 Integration of scales into the theory . 194 7.2 Integration of scalar relations into the lexicon . .....199 7.3 The analysis of postverbal dependents and their scalar semantics . 201 7.3.1 De-complements ......................203 vi 7.3.2 Goal complements . 205 7.3.3 Directional complements . 205 7.4 The analysis of resultatives . 209 7.4.1 Semantics of resultatives . 209 7.4.2 Lexical rules for resultatives . 212 7.4.3 Integration of resultatives into the type hierarchy . ....218 7.5 Summary . 218 8Representationofthebaˇ-construction in HPSG 221 8.1 General constraints . 222 8.1.1 The cause(r) requirement . 222 8.1.2 The general subcategorization structure of baˇ .......225 8.2 Intermediate summary . 227 8.3 Argument composition in the baˇ-construction . 228 8.4 Summary of the analysis and discussion . 243 Bibliography 249 vii Abbreviations and glosses The glossing follows the Leipzig Glossing Rules; additionally, I use the following language- and phenomenon-specific glosses and abbreviations: ADV adverbial marker 地 de ATTR attributive particle 的 de BA 把 baˇ BACK directional verb 回 huí (‘move back’) BEI 被 bèi CCL Corpus of the Center for Chinese Linguistics at Beijing University CONTINUE metaphorical directional 下去 xiàqù (continuation of an action) DEG degree or resultative construction marker 得 de DOWN directional verb 下 xià (‘move downwards’) EMPH emphatic cleft construction 是。。。的 shì . de FROM.HERE deictic directional verb 去 qù HSK8000 Dictionary of Chinese Usage: 8000 Words – HSK Vocabulary Guideline 汉语8000词词典 INTERR sentence-final interrogative particle 吗 ma LCMC Collection of Chinese Corpora of the University of Leeds LOC locative postnominal particle MOD sentence-final particle 了 le NEG.PFV perfective negative particle 没 méi RES resultative complement in a resultative compound TO.HERE deictic directional verb 来 lái TURN.INTO valence-increasing resultative complement 成 chéng, denoting the transformation of an entity into another entity UP directional verb 上 shàng (‘move upwards’) viii Introduction In Indo-European linguistics, argument structure has long been considered as a level of linguistic representation in its own right. Early approaches, such as Fill- more’s Case Grammar (Fillmore, 1968, 1971a,b), assume that universal mapping principles can predict the surface realization of a predicate’s arguments from the lexical representation of this predicate. In turn, the lexical representation consists of a list of semantic role labels. This view obscurs the metalevel status of argu- ment structure at the syntax-semantics interface. After thediscoveryofarange of phenomena that cannot be explained if semantic analysis stops at the level of semantic roles, researchers have paid more attention to the real-world properties of events, commonly referred to as “event structure”. Thus, frequent primitive event components, multiple “tiers” of semantic roles (aspectual, causal) as well as typical modes of involvement of event participants have been considered as the syntactically relevant aspects of predicate meaning (Anderson, 1971; Ostler, 1979; Jackendoff, 1983, 1990; Dowty, 1991; van Valin, 1993; Tenny, 1992, 1994; Reinhart, 2000, 2001, 2002; Ackermann and Moore, 2001). These more recent approaches still take participant structure as the main deter- minant of argument structure. This seems to be appropriate attheleveloflexical representation; however, once we consider alternative argument realization pat- terns that reflect different construals of the same event, participant structure may not be sufficient to contrast these patterns against each other. Facing this problem, 1 authors have frequently recurred to pragmatic and information-structural treat- ments, explaining the motivation behind argument alternations by different dis- course properties and patterns of profiling or emphasis of theparticipants. If we consider Chinese, the traditional approach to argumentstructureappears to be even more problematic. Syntactic relations in Chinese are not as clearly de- fined as for Indo-European languages. Besides, the language comes with a rather unusual system of argument realization: while imposing strict constraints on con- stituent order, the language leaves a lot of freedom in the expression of arguments. Syntactic NP positions can be instantiated with a variety of semantic arguments; various options for argument sharing, omission, addition and splitting challenge approaches that view the lexicon as main determinant of argument structure and realization. This study focusses on the Chinese baˇ-construction, which is one
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