Abstract
There have been not a few studies on the syntactic behaviors of Chinese psychological predicates (or psych verbs), denoting affection and emotion such as love, anger and fear. Most of them focus on the unique behaviors within the GB (government and binding) framework. Different from them, this thesis aims to explore the interactions between constructions and meanings of psych verbs. We ferret out the semantic varieties among psychological predicates by looking into the constructions in which they can or cannot occur. We then lay out the features belonging to psych verbs at the end of this study. To ensure the authenticity of the data, all the constructions in this thesis come from the Sinica Corpus and Google. To guarantee that the selected verbs would be representative ones, we focus on the discussion about seven verbs, i.e.ai4 (love), xi3-huan1 (like), qi4 (anger or be angry), sheng1-qi4 (be angry), pa4 (fear), hai4-pa4 (be afraid) and xia4 (frighten), which are selected due to the high frequency of occurrence at the Sinica Corpus. They can be divided into three types. The first type is the Theme-Subject predicates, e.g. xia4 (frighten). The second type is the Experiencer-Subject predicates, including verbs, e.g. ai4 (love), xi3-huan1 (like) and adjectives, e.g. hai4-pa4 (be afraid), sheng1-qi4 (be angry). The third type is the amphibious predicates like qi4 (anger or be angry) and pa4 (fear). Verbs of this type tend to express ambiguous readings because they can be regarded as Theme-Subject and/or Experiencer-Subject predicates at the same time. We compare their basic patterns and obtain some interesting findings. Two examples are given as follows. One is about the argument structure. Experiencer and Theme are important elements but they may not necessarily appear simultaneously. Experiencer, as well as Theme, can be shaded in certain constructions. In addition, degree adverbs play a crucial role in certain constructions. Sometimes they even determine the grammaticality of a sentence. The other example is about the interaction between causatives and resultatives. If there is only one argument in a construction, the predicate with CAUSE will assign Experiencer to the subject position. However, when there is an object in the same construction, the subject position will be assigned Theme. Experiencer goes to the object position. Meanwhile, the referent of the resultative state alters with the constructions. In this thesis, a general introduction is given in chapter one. Some theoretic notions are provided in chapter two. Previous studies are reviewed in chapter three. Chapter four and five comprise the data analysis. Conclusion is given in the final chapter.