Abstract
Verbs in Chinese are said to have no morphological pairs of transitive and intransitive verbs. This paper proposes that the word order in Chinese can also cause the confusion between transitive and intransitive verbs. In Chinese existential sentences the theme arguments are placed after the verbs, like themes in transitive sentences. The semantic role of the subject in Chinese may determine the grammatical case of the noun in the corresponding Japanese sentence. If the subject in Chinese is locative, the noun after the verb can be translated as JD, whereas the noun after the verb can be translated as R in the transitive sentences.
