Where Does the Argument of Chinese Unaccusative Verbs Initially Map? An Analysis Based on the fMRI Study

The initial mapping position of the Chinese unaccusative verb’s argument has been widely debated. To analyze this issue, the present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare neural processing mechanisms among: (a) unaccusative NP-V forms, (b) unaccusative V-NP forms and (c) verb-object structures (base-generated structures). Experimental results indicate that unaccusative V-NP forms showed significantly greater activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG, BA44), the left middle temporal gyrus (LMTG, BA21), the left inferior parietal lobe (LIPL, BA40) and the left superior parietal lobe (LSPL, BA7), which reflected the processing of derived structures with an argument’s syntactic movement, compared with the other two structures. Meanwhile, no significant difference was found between unaccusative NP-V forms and verb-object structures. These results suggest that: (1) unaccusative NP-V forms are base-generated structures similar to basic verb-object structures; (2) unaccusative V-NP forms are derived structures whose argument undergoes a syntactic movement from the subject position to the postverbal focus position. These findings indicate that the argument of Chinese unaccusative verbs initially maps to the subject position rather than the object position.