The syntax-semantics interface in the Chinese ba-construction

Abstract

The ba-construction is one of the few marked argument structure constructions in Chinese and represents a typical challenge for linguistic theory – being very frequent in language use, its contexts of use and its meaning are subject to rather clear intuitions of native speakers; on the other hand, the usage and semantics of the bǎ-construction cannot be described in terms of commonly assumed semantic categories and still less in terms of constructs assumed in formal theories. Thus, the researcher is forced to question existing concepts and to dedicate himself to the search of criteria, possible novel ones, that might explain facts which are so naturally perceived, understood and differentiated by language users. Besides, the bǎ-construction also illustrates some important characteristics of the Chinese language which turn into challenges for formal approaches. First, Chinese has a poor morphology and a rather unflexible constituent order; when thinking about argument structure, we might be tempted to think that the semantic part of argument structure can be “read” from surface constituent order. However, this is not the case – Chinese is rather versatile in argument distribution, and an NP that occupies a given syntactic slot can often be assigned a multitude of se- mantic roles. Second, the bǎ-construction also stands for the general pragmatic orientation of Chinese grammar, which shows off in its strong context dependence and the subjectification function. The present study takes the semantics of the construction as a starting point. 275 It aims at a precise formalization of semantic constraints which characterize the cases in which the bǎ-construction is licensed. Structural aspects are treated in a second step since the proposed semantic formalization also allows to resolve major issues that have been raised in structural studies of the bǎ-construction. The central facts about the construction that are targeted and explained are as follows: 1. The Chinese bǎ-construction allows for a range of different argument dis- tributions; in some cases, bǎ may select its own arguments. 2. The bǎ-construction places specific semantic constraints on its lexical pred- icate; thus, lexical verbs can be divided into three classes: (a) Verbs that occur in the bǎ-construction in “bare” form (b) Verbs that occur in the bǎ-construction with additional dependents that contribute to the satisfaction of the semantic constraint of bǎ (c) Verbs that do not occur in the bǎ-construction 3. The meaning of the bǎ-construction, when contrasted to the less marked SVO word order or to structures with reduplicated verbs, is perceived vaguely as “disposal”, “affectedness” or the “exertion of an influence”. The proposed analysis is based on scalar semantics, a line of semantic reason- ing introduced by Sapir (1944) and formalized and applied to different linguistic structures in a large body of recent literature (Hay et al., 1999; Wechsler, 2001; Gawron, 2005; Caudal and David, 2005; Beavers, 2006; Kennedy and Levin, 2008; Levin, 2010; Kennedy, 2012; Beavers, 2011a, 2012; Beavers and Zubair, 2011). The use of bǎ is semantically constrained in terms of scalarity and cau- sation. This semantic description is independent of the participant structure of a given instantiating predicate, which allows it to accommodate different argument distributions. Further, we note that bǎ is analyzed as a head and thus allows to 276 constrain central semantic properties of the clause and, specifically, of the lexi- cal predicate. The constraints are applied not to lexical verbs, but to the complex formed by the verb and its complements and modifiers. Thus, the verb is con- sidered together with its additional dependents, such as resultative or directional complements, manner modifiers etc., which can also contribute to the satisfaction of the constraint. The semantics is formalized into an HPSG analysis which also accounts for structural aspects of the construction. It is accompanied by analyses of additional verbal dependent structures which can contribute to the licensing of the bǎ-construction. Just as the semantic constraint, the structural analysis is in- dependent of the argument structure of a given lexical instantiation and derives the argument distribution in a given lexical instantiation from the interaction be- tween the argument structure of the lexical predicate, the causer requirement and the scalar constraint of bǎ.