Abstract
ABSTRACT This thesis deals with the syntax and semantics of Chinese secondary predicate construction with comparative extension to English and Korean. The primary issue of this thesis, then, is twofold. First, we investigate the syntactic representations and semantic interpretations of the distinct subtypes of Chinese secondary predicates, focusing on the status and the nature of the secondary subject. Various syntactic tests present convincing arguments that both control construction and small clause construction are involved in the internal structure of resultatives according to the selectedness of the secondary subject; besides, the superficially same but actually different subtypes of Chinese secondary predicates, such as descriptives and evaluatives, are attributed to the different nature of the empty subject and the licensing mechanism of it. A special attention is also given to the correlation between the V-de construction and its corresponding V-V compound on the basis of the parallelism between the sentence-syntax and word-syntax in Chinese. Second, we examine several properties peculiar to the secondary predicate construction, and try to provide a principled explanation for deriving cross-linguistic variations seen among Chinese, English and Korean. We argue that both resultatives and depictives share common syntactic and semantic properties among those three languages, but the actual realization of them, such as distributional asymmetries of depictives and the restriction on the occurrence of bare resultatives, may be different depending on the language-specific phrase structure rule and event licensing mechanism.