BA/BEI…DE Constructions as a Family of Resultative Constructions:A Constructional-Conceptual Perspective

• Main Author: 馮美齡
• Other Authors: 賴惠玲
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/68894745356531004028

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言研究所 === 93 === The use of ba/bei alone does not imply causative meanings; however, when a de result complement is added to ba/bei constructions, the causative sense will arise concomitantly with resultivity. Therefore, ba/bei…de in the sentences, two discontinous morphemes locking together, mark the whole construction as a resultative construction. By adopting constructional approaches, we show that ba/bei…de resultatives are not limited to disposal verbs and they are made of a family of resultative constructions. Without the inherent disposal property and the causative meaning, stative, perception, and psychological verbs are still compatible with ba/bei…de resultatives. The causative-resultative meaning comes from the integration among all the components of the construction, both structurally and semantically. Also, under such a constructional approach, we will find that many semantic properties of ba/bei…de resultatives can be predicted from their meaning structures: a resultative sentence contains a constructional subevent and a verbal subevent, and this verbal subevent serves as the means by which the constructional subevent takes place. As for their temporal relation, the verbal subevent may be cotemporal with the constructional subevent, or may overlap with it, or may entirely precede it, depending on the pragmatics of the situation. And the end-boundedness of the constructional subevent correlates with the telicity of a resultative construction. And with some modifications of Jackendoff’s conceptual structure, we discern how a resultative concept is characterized in the human mental representation. In terms of a set of primitives, we can easily detect that ba/bei…de constructions are made of two separable subevents, and that the verbal subevent is temporally prior to the constructional subevent.