Mandarin Intransitive Reflexive Verbs and the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Mandarin Intransitive Reflexive Verbs)

The present paper focuses on the Mandarin Intransitive keflexive Verbs. These verbs, such as zi-sha 'to commit suicide', and zi fen 'to burn oneself, are formed with a reflexive morpheme zi-'self' and a root verb. Take the verb zi-sha 'to commit suicide' for example, the reflexive morpheme contributes the reflexive meaning and the root verb sha 'to kill' contributes the meaning`to kill'; hence, the meaning 'to kill oneself. Two previous analyses have different classification of these reflexive verbs. For instance, Tang's (1992) analysis implies that these verbs are unergative, while Kao (1993) asserts that they are unaccusative. In light of the previous analyses, we present an alternative analysis by giving new data that are largely selected from Sinica Corpus. By scrutinizing the syntactic behavior of reflexive verbs, calculation of thematic properties of the subject, and the event structure of these predicates, we propose a morpholexical operation of reflexivization and conclude that intransitive reflexive verbs are unaccusative. Although our conclusion seems to be as same as Kao's conclusion, two analyses are strikingly different from each other. We will prove that Kao's analysis can only account for the partial truth, while the present analysis can fully explain the linguistic phenomenon of Mandarin intransitive reflexive verbs. In addition, the implication of two analyses is also different. It is believed that the present analysis offers additional evidence to support the idea that the distinction between thematic roles is not discrete.