An Event Structure Analysis of Object-oriented Adverbial Clauses

Abstract

In Mandarin Chinese, there exists such adverbial clause as “Li Zhen cuicuide zhale yipan huashengmi” (Li Zhen fried a dish of peanuts crispy), in which the adverbial modifies the predicate verb but semantically orients to the object. This kind adverbial clause can be formulated as “NPs+APo+De+VP+NPo=NP+VP+O and O is characterized by the adverbial”. The object-oriented adverbial clause is a mismatched syntax-semantics phenomenon, with the mapping between form and meaning distorted. Many previous studies have proposed not fully identical analyses for the syntactic distribution, pragmatic motivation and constraints. However, few researches have made syntactic and semantic analyses from the perspective of event structure in the framework of formal linguistics, which leaves wide space for further study.Event structure theory is adopted in this paper to make analysis of object-oriented adverbial clauses in event semantics perspective. This paper aims to examine the syntactic structure from the perspective of event semantic structure and explore how event structure is represented in syntactic structure of object-oriented adverbial clause.