Structural head and aspectuality

要旨

Though both Chinese and Japanese allow resultative compounds of the form V cause -V result , Japanese resultative compounds do not show the semantic ambiguities that their Chinese counterparts have. I argue that this difference results from the interaction of three factors. First, resultative compounds are morphologically head-initial in Chinese but head-final in Japanese. Secondly, resultative compounds are also associated with an event structure whose head is always represented by V cause of the compound. Thirdly, a universal condition requiring iconic representation of the temporal relations between two subevents makes V cause linearly precede V result . The result of this work supports the claim that many differences among languages can be accounted for with universal principles plus simple parametric variations.

主題