Lability of Verbs and the Change-of-State Construction in Chinese.

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2017-08
Authors
Zhang, Liulin
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East Asian Lang & Lit-Chinese
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It has often been noted that some Chinese verbs can be used transitively or intransitively, and that the syntactically privileged argument (subject) in these different uses has different semantic roles. Many terms have been introduced to describe this phenomenon, among which verb lability appears to be the most felicitous one, given its transparency and straightforwardness: it does not pertain to notions absent in Chinese, nor does it encode any information about the function of the transitive/intransitive construction pair, which has been highly contentious in previous studies. Set within the framework of cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, this dissertation proceeds from the assumption that language is usage-based instead of rule-generated. Accordingly, it employs a diachronic corpus-based approach. Meanwhile, to adapt to the special feature of Chinese, i.e., the rich varieties of Chinese are connected by characters, this dissertation’s diachronic analysis of lexical semantics is based on Chinese characters. Corpus data from the pre-Qin period (Old Chinese), the Tang dynasty (Middle Chinese), and the Ming dynasty (Early Mandarin) show that the ‘theme + labile verb’ construction is extraordinarily ancient and stable in Chinese, and that historically, labile verbs prototypically denote changes of state. An extensive study of verbal semantics in Modern Mandarin reveals two semantic factors determining verb lability: change of state and spontaneity. While change of state is the prototypical function of labile verbs and the construction pairs formed by them, the contingency between labile verbs and their transitive/intransitive use is sensitive to the likelihood of spontaneous occurrence of the event being described. This finding holds in a cross-linguistic context, reflecting general characteristics of human conceptualization. The complex event structure represented by a change-of-state event gives way to two competing strategies for 􀀉 􀀪􀀵􀀉 profiling in human construal – agent orientation and theme orientation – which respectively lead to the transitive use and intransitive use of a verbal. However, as an isolating language in which causative/anticausative is not marked, Chinese exhibits an overwhelmingly large group of labile verbs in comparison with other languages. The intransitive change-of-state construction (CSC) formed by labile verbs has traditionally been referred to as the notional passive construction, and distinguished from the socalled Chinese passive construction marked by 么bei. After investigating the process of grammaticalization of the character 么, it is found that 么 derived an ‘affected’ sense in construal from its lability (denoting ‘cover/receive’), and thus the 么bei construction (BEIC) can be roughly represented as ‘affectee +么+ event’. In contrast to CSC, BEIC predominantly takes animate subjects as affectees, and the events that affect them are not limited to change-ofstate events. In Chinese, the overall frequency of CSC is much higher than that of BEIC, but this prevalence is not commented upon or otherwise reflected in Chinese textbooks. Moreover, previous studies have reported contradictory findings about learners’ acquisition of CSC and BEIC. Taking a usage-based approach to language acquisition, The present research includes two experiments involving picture-description tasks. The results indicate that Chinese learners use more BEICs and fewer CSCs than native speakers do. Additionally, due to the difference in markedness, CSC is much more difficult to notice during incidental exposure than BEIC is, rendering explicit instruction necessary. It needs to be noted that such explicit instruction merely functions to counteract the attentional bias, and is not necessarily about the selectional constrainsts between these two constructions, which are inherent in learners’ cognition.
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Chinese, Verb, Change of state, Construction, Cognitive linguistics
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