A Corpus-Based Study of Semantic-Syntactic Inferfaces of Chinese and English Change-of-State Verbs

In an attempt to explore the relation between the lexical properties of verbs and their syntactic structure cross-linguistically, we made a corpus-based study of the syntactic behaviour of Chinese and English change-of-state(COS) verbs.The study shows that English COS verbs are ergative verbs characterized with the use of causative alternation and resultative construction, demonstrating much monotonicity in their syntactic behavior.Chinese COS verbs, most of which are ergative verbs with causative alternation but only some have resultative construction, show much more variety in their syntactic structure.An important cause of these differences is that Chinese and English COS verbs are different in their core semantics and roots.