Sinica venetiana

A Corpus-Based Investigation of Manner/State Complement Constructions in Mandarin Chinese

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Abstract

This study is an investigation of the complement constructions of manner and state (CM/S, e.g. 他的字写得好 tā de zì xiě de hǎo ‘he writes characters well’) based on a corpus of written Chinese. We find that CM/S have preferred forms and functions. Formally speaking, a monosyllabic verb, preferably 变 biàn ‘change, become’, basic action verbs, or psychological state verbs tend to co-occur with complements of adjectival, clausal, or idiomatic expressions. CM/S are argued to be an assessment device indexing speaker evaluative stances. The loaded affective meanings, we contend, account for the larger and more complex forms than their standard assessment counterparts. The implications of these findings on Chinese syntactic research and on L2 learning are explored.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: June 30, 2020 | Accepted: Oct. 14, 2020 | Language: en

Keywords Iconicity • Complement of Manner • Evaluative Stance • Assessment • Complement of State • Construction Grammar • Chinese Complement Construction

Copyright © 2020 Hongyin Tao, Hong Gang Jin, Jie Zhang. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-406-6/001


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