| Description |
To some extent, the history of generative grammar is a history of ongoing efforts to
seek out a careful balance between simplicity at the deep level and the complexity on
the surface of human language. Recent studies on shell structures by Richard Larson
(1988, 2014etc), Micro-parameters relevant to analyticity-synthesis continuum by
Huang (2005, 2015 etc.), cartographic studies on functional heads by Luigi Rizzi (2015),
Cinque(1999, 2008), Tsai (2004, 2015 etc.) Si (2002, 2015 & 2017) among many others,
all point to a same direction. That is, these studies are all interested in giving more
detailed analysis on those more-micro elements on one hand, and seeking for general
laws shared by all languages on the other hand. Following these footsteps, this paper
discusses different types of light verbs in both Chinese and English, with an attempt to
make an investigation on possible distributions of these light verbs from a cartographic
perspective.
A common goal shared by all cartographic studies is “to draw maps as precise and
detailed as possible of syntactic configurations” (Cinque, 2008). A great progress that
previous cartographic studies have made is enabling us to consider a single projection
such as CP or TP as an abbreviation for a much richer structural zone. For instance, the
C layer is split into Topic and Focus components (Rizzi & Bocci 2005) and Topic and
Focus themselves are also conceived as Topic “field” and Focus “field”, encoding
different and hierarchically arranged topic elements or focus elements
(Beninca’&Poletto, 2004). Similarly, this paper suggests that “light verb” can also be
further analyzed as a “light verb field”, containing several layers of different light verbs,
conveying different information. Based on this, a Split Light Verb Hypothesis is
proposed: from a cartographic point of view, the light verb “v” is not “ONE” head,
but an umbrella name of a rather “rich structural” zone, call it “light verb field” or “light
verb zone”. It is also suggested that in some complex light verb constructions, the
predicate is not composed of one single argument structure, but a chain of several
argument structures. Superficially, the structures provided here look more complicated
than the traditional ones, but “……natural languages seem to privilege local simplicity
of configurations and relations (with featurally simple heads and configurationally
simple projections), accepting to pay the price of an increased global complexity
through the accumulation of simple atomic structures.” (Luigi Rizzi, 2015)
Keywords: Light verbs, Cartography, Split light verb hypothesis
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