Motivations and mechanisms behind the formation of event attributes
This paper proposes a concept of"event attribute",and analyzes the motivations and mechanisms behind its formation.In contrast to appellation attribute,event attribute semantically serves as an adverbial modifier of the verb-object structure but syntactically acts as an attribute of the object,thus creating a form-meaning mismatch.However,the formation of such mismatch is subject to many factors.First of all,it emerges from pragmatic motivations,particularly under the"end-focus"principle.This requires the object to enhance its semantic content,with the addition of modifiers acting as a syntactic remedy.Secondly,the manifestation of pragmatic motivation is subject to prosodic adjustment and semantic integration.The former requires the modifier to satisfy syntactic constraints of both the verb-object construction and the modifier-head construction in terms of syllable counts and parts of speech;The latter ensures that the modifier would eventually assume an eventive semantic property.In other words,event attribute is an outcome of the interface between pragmatic,prosodic and semantic factors.
万方数据
维普
