A Study on the Syntactic Distribution of Patient Complements in Chinese and English
Driven by The Principle of Syntactic Temporal Order Iconicity,VO languages tend not to have patient complements that must be adjacent to verbs,such as in English.However,most patient complements in Chinese are required to be adjacent to verbs.One explanation is that the Chinese verb-complement structure has undergone vary-ing degrees of grammaticalization,while the other is that Chinese syntax has some relatively developed patient prepo-sition structures,which not only puts patient complements to a position adjacent to verbs,but also meets the require-ment of Chinese syntax for temporal order arrangement.There is no patient complement in Chinese that cannot be immediately adjacent to a verb(i.e.that must be placed after an object),which is related to the relatively developed patient preposition structures in Chinese.In addition to the traditional double object structure in English,noun phras-es as complements cannot be immediately adjacent to a verb and can only be placed after an object.One explanation is that it is driven by the predicative nature of the cross-language NV structure,and the other is that there are both syntactic and semantic constraints.This dual restriction can also be used to explain the syntactic phenomenon that some Chinese patients cannot be placed behind the patient complement,to which the solution is to prepose the pa-tient.
Patient Complements in Chinese and EnglishSyntactic DistributionPatient PrepositionThe Principle of Syntactic Temporal Order Iconicity
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
