It is a well-known fact that the pretransitive construction is employed not only to express ‘an intended disposal’ done by the subject of a sentence, but also to express ‘an accident’ happened to the subject of a sentence. In this paper the writer aims at demonstrating (1) that in Modern Chinese Grammar there are some syntactic rules which were created through ‘the involuntary projection of mental refraction’ of a person, (2) that the pretransitive construction for ‘accidents’ must be analyzed from such a point of view as (1), and (3) that the pretransitive construction for ‘accidents’ can be classified into three types according to their meanings and syntactic characteristics: (a) ‘accidental’ disposal, (b) ‘passive’ disposal, and (3) ‘spontaneous’ disposal.
View full abstract