Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

(singke) #1
MANDARIN CLAUSE LINKAGE 225

patient, and actor is the most marked, the argument of "bad" is interpreted
as being coreferent with the undergoer "shoes".
The interpretation of (49b) proceeds the same way. Under the RRG
analysis of perception verbs as cases of motion (motion of the stimulus from
the perceived to the perceiver), the predicate of V\ "listen" requires the
case roles experiencer and theme. The predicate of V 2 "irritated" requires
the case role patient in the RRG analysis. Both the experiencer and the
patient must be animate with these verbs. Of the two arguments, "I" is
assigned the macrorole actor, and "song" the macrorole undergoer, and
because of animacy restrictions that these verbs place on their arguments,
"I" rather than "song" is taken to be the argument of "irritated". Hence
animacy is the primary factor affecting the interpretation of (49b).
The above examples should show why treatment of CCs as nuclear
junctures can explain the different case role and interpretive problems and
capture the intuitive notion that animate "I" can be the argument of an
emotive verb such as "irritated", while "song" cannot be.


5.3 Causality

In (47) above it was shown that a Complement of Result can have a purely
causative meaning. (47a) and (47b) are exactly parallel to the English (50a)
and (50b) respectively:
(50) a. The cloth got damp,
b. I dampened the cloth.
Under lexical decomposition as practiced in RRG (based on Dowty 1979)
using operators like BECOME and CAUSE on basic predicates, the logical
structures of (50a) and (50b) are (50c) and (50d) respectively:
(50)  [BECOME damp' (cloth)]
d. [do' (I)] CAUSE [BECOME damp' (cloth)]
Here do' expresses activity, and CAUSE expresses the cause-effect or
action-result relationship. The abstract operator CAUSE is thus used to
represent the difference between simplex and causative verbs. It is also
used in a way similar to the Generative Semantics analysis of kill as "cause
to die" to differentiate accomplishment verbs involving causal chaining
from other types of verbs (see "Synopsis", section 3.2). Tai's (1984) obser­
vation that Mandarin has no lexical accomplishment verbs is relevant here.
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