A Contrastive Study of Resultative Constructions in English, Japanese and Chinese

Abstract

Researching on resultative constructions has become a hot topic in linguistic field in recent years, because it plays an important role in illuminating the nature of lexical semantics and its relationship with syntax. This paper simply contrasts resultative constructions in English, Japanese and Chinese from the perspectives of their syntactic structures and Washio’s (1997) semantic distinctions, that is, strong resultatives and weak resultatives. I mainly discuss their similarities and differences to deepen our understanding of resultative constructions among these three languages. This paper is organized as follows: section 1 simply introduces types of resultative constructions in English, Japanese and Chinese; section 2 introduces Washio's analysis of strong and weak resultatives; section 3 compares V-V compound resultatives in Japanese and Chinese to illustrate their differences; section 4 compares resultative constructions in three languages which are based on Washio’s (1997) semantic analysis to identify the differences on resultatives in these three languages and furtherly explain why Japanese has only weak resultatives, according to Washio’s analysis; section 5 is the conclusion of this paper.