Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the universal semantic factors, as well as the language specific properties, which operate behind verbs to initiate or block causative/inchoative alternations in Chinese and Japanese, within the framework of lexical semantics and cognitive grammar. The dissertation has verified the following: 1. Universally, the necessary condition for causative/inchoative alternation is a compound event structure consisting of a ‘causal event’ (superevent) and a ‘resultative event’ (subevent). 2. The universal semantic feature initiating ‘detransitivization’ is a kind of ‘internal force’ by which the internal argument of Theme can change the state by itself. 3. In Chinese, the ‘resultative compound verb’ plays an important role in causative/inchoative alternation, while in Japanese there is a rich and complicated system of suffixes by which transitive/intransitive verbs can be distinguished. 4. ‘Agency’ is the strongest semantic factor blocking ‘detransitivization’. However, Chinese has some strategies to trigger ‘detransitivization’, including syntactic suppression of the Agent by adding resultative states or telic phase markers like ‘-hao/-wan/-guang/diao’ to transitive verbs, and by incorporating the existential construction of ‘Locative Vt-zhe Theme’. Japanese also has strategies of converting transitive verbs to ‘decausativized’ intransitive verbs by the suffix ‘-ar-’ or by the auxiliary verb ‘-(te)-aru-’. 5. From the viewpoint of cognitive grammar, both Chinese and Japanese have many grammatical strategies for ‘foregrounding’ resultative states and ‘backgrounding’ the Agent, but none of them is as comprehensive or systematic as passivization in English. This difference supports the claim that both Chinese and Japanese are ‘Patient-oriented’ languages (see also Tai(1984,2002) Kageyama(1996)), while English is an ‘Agent-oriented’ language. 6. Although both languages have resultative compound verbs, they behave differently in causative/inchoative alternation. Since Chinese has neither nominative/accusative case markers nor morphological distinction between transitive/intransitive verbs, ‘decausativization’ is quite flexible in the language. This could be related to the typological classification that Chinese is a ‘topic-oriented language’. On the other hand, since Japanese has both case markers and morphological suffixes to distinguish transitive verbs from intransitive ones, ‘decausativization’ for compound verbs is more restricted.