Abstract
This work starts with the discussion on the verbs of happening fasheng ‘happen’ in Mandarin Chinese and happen in English. Previous studies show that verbs of happening are unaccusative verbs and also occur frequently in the locative inversion constructions (Perlmutter 1978, Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995). Besides, there also have been researchers who propose that Mandarin Chinese exhibits locative inversion, that is, an internal locative argument raising to the subject position (Li & Thompson 1981, S. Huang 1982, Wu 2008). However, Lin (2001, 2008, 2009) assumes that the locative subjects may not arise from inversion of an internal argument or adjunct, but is introduced by light verbs. The locative subjects have no association with any VP-internal position. Therefore, from the evidence provided in this work, I adopt Lin’s (2009) theory and propose that the verb fasheng ‘happen’ is introduced by the light verb OCCUR. Besides, the locative expression is licensed by the light verb OCCUR as its specifier. In English, the verb happen projects a VP, with a locative expression as the specifier and this VP is the complement of a light verb v, which agrees with the verb happen. Additionally, we also compare fasheng ‘happen’ and happen. In fact, there is an asymmetry between fasheng ‘happen’ and happen in their complement selection. On this point, we introduce the theory of Generative Lexicon proposed by Pustejovsky (1995) and type coercion mechanisms to explain this asymmetry. Another issue addressed in this thesis is the properties and structures of the verbs of appearance chuxian ‘appear’ and chu ‘appear’ in Mandarin Chinese. First, we investigate the difference between fasheng ‘happen’ and chuxian ‘appear’ and observe that fasheng ‘happen’ is the complement of the light verb OCCUR, but chuxian ‘appear’ is the complement of the light verb EXIST. Second, we also discuss the different uses of the verb chu ‘appear’. In our analysis, there are two different syntactic constructions. Namely, the verb chu can be a transitive verb, and takes two arguments, or functions as a motion verb taking NP (source) as its complement.