Verbal compounding and causativity in Mandarin Chinese

This thesis deals with the issue of left-headed verbal V-V compounds in Mandarin Chinese, which represent an interesting phenomenon, since they are an exception to the general tendency of Chinese to form right-headed compounds. In particular, this research takes into account some types of left-headed causative compounds, which are considered as an alternative (analytic) strategy to express causativity in Mandarin Chinese, after the loss of other morphological and phonological strategies, as a consequence of the typological shift of Chinese from a synthetic to an analytic language. This thesis provides an analysis of such causative compounds adopting the framework put forth by Ramchand (2008), which consists in a syntactic decomposition of the event structure. First, we consider the issue of the causative alternation by means of phonetically realized light V1s, e.g. 弄 nòng ‘make’, 打 dǎ ‘hit’, 搞 gǎo ‘do’, 加 jiā ‘add; increase’. The phonetically realized light verbs are considered to be init heads with semantics of general causation, which build an extra-layer on top of verbs lacking an [init] feature in their lexical entry, through a process of structure building. We focus mainly on 打 dǎ ‘hit’ (and, also, comparing it with analogous roots in Taiwanese Southern Min and Hakka) and 加 jiā ‘add; increase’, which is found only in the formation of transitive deadjectival verbs based on open-range adjectives, in particular those involving an increase in the property denoted by the adjective. We claim that 加 jiā ‘add; increase’, besides contributing an extra (causative) layer, seems also to be the overt realization of one of the parts involved in the logical representation of degree achievement verbs, i.e. the increasing event (cf. Hay, Kennedy & Levin 1999). The second type of causative V-V compounds discussed in this thesis are resultative compounds, e.g. 摇醒 yáoxǐng ‘shake-awake’, 哭湿 kūshī ‘cry-wet’, a very debated issue in the literature on the topic, which apparently arose as an alternative causative strategy after the loss of other means to express causativity in Chinese, following the typological shift undergone by this language. In resultative compounds the nature of the causing event is fully expressed by the left-hand verbal root, specifying the kind of action which brings about the change of state, while in transitive verbs formed with a light V1 the causing event is spelled out by the left-hand verbal root, which just provides an [init] feature to the event. In the latter case, many different actions can bring about the resultant state expressed by V2, much as in the case of English labile causatives, e.g. break. The decomposition of the event structure based on a hierarchical functional structure also enables us to defend the position that resultative compounds are left-headed due to structural reasons (cf. Cheng & Huang 1994). In fact, assuming a structural notion of headedness, it is clear that V1 acts as the head of the compound: the two constituents of a resultative compound spell out different heads in a functional hierarchical structure characterized by causal embedding; nevertheless, it is V1 which identifies the hierarchically superior head in the structure. Lastly, this thesis takes into account another kind of left-headed causative compounds, which, to the best of our knowledge, have not received much attention in the literature. We propose a tentative analysis of this kind of compounds, which, according to us, express indirect causation. Differently from resultative compounds and causative verbs with a light V1, these compounds allow a certain degree of autonomy of the caused event, which varies according to the kind of V1 involved. The set of possible roots occurring in this kind of compounds is quite restricted, e.g. 请 qǐng ‘ask’, 邀 yāo ‘invite, request’, 求 qiú ‘ask, request’, 劝 quàn ‘advice/persuade’, 促 cù ‘promote’, 助 zhù ‘help’, 逼 bì ‘force’, 迫 pò ‘force’, 禁 jìn ‘prohibit’, 拒 jù ‘refuse’. Some of these items are apparently very similar to curative affixes in some languages . The analysis of such verbal formations, also in a diachronic and, marginally, cross-linguistic perspective, enables us to support Ramchand’s (2008) claim, namely that the fundamental building blocks of the eventive meaning are the same for all languages, and languages vary only in the “size” of their lexical items, plus other idiolinguistic characteristics: thus, the very same syntactic structures can be expressed lexically, synthetically or analytically, depending on the language and on the particular lexical items in its inventory. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that an analytic language like Modern Chinese prefers to express complex event structures through compounding, which is also its most productive means of word formation.