ABSTRACT
This dissertation started out with laying out the empirical focus of the research, namely, the argument structure phenomena in Chinese involving non-transparent relations between the predicator (often a verb) of a sentence and its direct internal and external arguments. Issues raised by such phenomena are discussed, particularly with respect to the traditional verb-centered, Projectionist view of the relation between the Lexicon and the Syntax. The specific goal of this study was therefore to account for what I called noncanonical argument structure phenomena from an alternative perspective, a perspective that shares the spirit of construction-and unification-based grammatical theories. The idea of fundamental importance under this perspective is that there is no principled boundary between the lexicon and extra-lexical grammatical information, in contrast to the special role accorded to the lexicon under Projectionist approaches.
