漢語中的V-多結構

Abstract

本論文旨在討論漢語中的V-多結構。V-多結構有幾個特性，其中之一是事件的量不能被固定住。本文認為其原因是因為標準的事件的量會隨著語境而有所不同。而標準的事件的量之所以會隨著語境而改變跟「多」的語意是有關的。根據Kennedy(2007)提出的隱性比較的判斷標準，即簡明判斷(crisp judgments)和差值度量(differential measurements)，以及V-多結構中不能放「比」的這個特性，本文認為V-多結構是隱性比較句。Kennedy (2007)提到隱性比較關涉到原級的語意，而原級的語意可假定有程度詞素pos的存在，而且pos會引介隨著語境而改變的標準。此外Liu (2010)認為漢語有pos這個不具語音形式的原級詞素。因此，本文認為V-多結構，作為隱性比較句，帶有 pos 這個不具語音形式的原級詞素。因為V-多是複合詞，所以我們認為pos在詞彙層次就併入「多」了。

This paper discusses several syntactic and semantic characteristics of the V-duo construction. One important property of the V-duo construction is that the event denoted by the VP cannot be telic, bounded, or quantized. This paper argues that the reason why the event must be atelic (unbounded, cumulative) is attributed to the context dependence property of the standard, which is implied by the semantics of duo. With regard to the preposed object in the V-duo construction, I pursue Paul’s (2002)proposal that the preposed object is an internal topic rather than a focus, but departing from Paul (2002), I argue that in the V-duo construction, multiple topics are allowed in the internal topic position, provided they belong to different types. Since Topic Phrase allows recursion(cf. Gasde & Paul 1996), I suggest that like the external topic, the internal topic in the V-duo construction is located in the Spec of TopicP. Movement of a constituent which is interpreted as a Topic is basically driven by feature checking. Based on the contextually dependent interpretations of duo, the diagnostics for implicit comparison proposed by Kennedy (2007) (i.e., crisp judgments and differential measurements)and the incompatibility with the word bi, this paper argues that the V-duo construction is an implicit comparison construction. According to Kennedy (2007), implicit comparison involves the semantics of the positive form. One option for the compositional semantics of the positive form, as Kennedy (2007) suggests, is to assume a covert positive morpheme pos with a denotation along the lines of (i), where s is a context sensitive function that takes a gradable predicate meaning as input and returns a standard of comparison appropriate for the context as output (cf. Cresswell 1977; von Stechow 1984; Kennedy & McNally 2005).

(i) [[Deg pos]] = λg.λx.g(x) > s(g)

In addition, according to Liu (2010), Chinese has a covert positive morpheme. Thus, it is not unreasonable for us to assume that the V-duo construction, as an implicit comparison construction, contains the covert positive morpheme pos, which is merged with or incorporated into the morpheme duo at lexical level because V-duo is a compound verb. The assumption that the semantics of duo is derived by merging pos with duo or by incorporating pos into duo at lexical level accounts for why the standard event quantity in the V-duo construction is context-sensitive.