Chappell, Hilary Margaret (1983). A semantic analysis of passive, causative and dative constructions in Standard Chinese. PhD thesis, Australian National University.
A semantic analysis of passive, causative and dative benefactive constructions in Chinese is carried out in this thesis.
In Part I, the view of the bèi passive as an adversity passive in its traditional use is upheld and supported principally by the evidence of the synchronic semantic analysis and secondarily by other considerations such as its evolution from verb to grammatical exponent, its restricted usage when compared with the neutral topic-comment constructions and its function as a warning in the negative imperative mood. The treatment of the bèi passive as a polysemous structure results in its division into two main types: the traditional bei passive, comprising four constructions, and the ‘Europeanized’ literary bèi passive where the influence of European languages in translation has led to the loss of the adversity feature and the modification of the semantic requirements pertaining to the agent with respect to its two constructions.
The analysis of the get passive in English as forming a complex of constructions – some adversative and others beneficial in their overall interpretation – serves as the link between the discussion of adversity passives in Part I and the discussion of the purely colloquial passives formed by ràng and jiào in Part II, where parallels are drawn between the non-reflexive adversative get passive and the rang passive.
In Part II, an argument in favour of considering the ràng and jiào passives to be semantically distinct both from one another and from the bèi passive is presented. It is contended that ràng forms passives of “avoidable events” whereas jiào forms passives expressing the unexpected nature of the event. The causative constructions formed by ràng and jiào are also treated in Part II and shown to differ considerably in their syntactic behaviour from their respective passive constructions despite the sharing of the same syntactic form. Evidence is adduced to support the view that none of the jiào causatives express the meaning of ‘let’ or ‘allow’ whereas some of the ràng causatives do. In this way, ràng and jiào causatives are shown not to be interchangeable.
In Part III, an argument is presented against the claim that the preverbal gěi construction in Chinese is polysemous to the extent of being a benefactive construction that is mutually substitutable with the meanings of two other constructions formed by ti ‘on behalf of’ and wei ‘for the sake of’. Secondly, it is argued that the benefactive gěi construction is not mutually transformable with either of the two dative constructions formed by gěi as each of these three constructions not only has a unique syntactic form but consequently a unique semantic structure.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
