Chinese verb phrases : continuum of patterns with different lexical statuses
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation explores how Chinese verbs and verb phrases can be best understood given that the boundary between the two categories are non-binary (Lu 1957, Chao 1968, and many others). In terms of morphological typology, compared with other languages like English, Chinese is more analytic and isolating, and more frequently uses compounding as a word-formation strategy. This study proposes a continuum between the lexical word and syntactic phrase to account for the blurry boundary between verbs and verb phrases. This dissertation approaches the V N sequences and V1 V2 sequences that are verbal compounds from the perspective of a continuum. Although the boundary between a word and a phrase is not clear-cut, the present study proposes a set of criteria to visualize systematically the lexicalization (Brinton & Traugott 2005) degrees of various V N sequences and V1 V2 sequences. Three major criteria with diagnostics are used to determine the lexical properties of the compounds in terms of form and meaning. The present study finds that a given V N sequence can be treated in four distinct manners: as a verb, if inseparable by the perfective aspect marker le; a word-like verb, if separable by aspectual marker le; a phrase-like verb, if separable by aspectual marker le with a non-referential N; or a verb phrase with a referential N. Like V N sequences, V1 V2 sequences in a continuum are compounds of different degrees of lexicalization (Brinton & Traugott 2005). Similarly, a V1 V2 sequence can take on four distinct patterns: as a change-of-state result verb (Tham 2012, 2013), if inseparable by infixal potential marker de or the negative bu; a word-like verb (also known as resultative compound), if separable by the infixal de or bu; a phrase-like verb (resultative compounds with a directional compound in the V2 position); or a verb phrase, when the phrase-like verb can take the perfective le or a nominal element between V1 and V2. Corpus search results with different collocational patterns and restrictions were found to support the V1 V2 resultative continuum hypothesis. The dissertation provides a new understanding of the non-binary distinctions between various verbal constructions. This constructional approach has significant implications to Teaching Chinese as a Second Language
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Yeh, Hsin Hung |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Sun, Chao, 1979- |
| Thesis advisor | Sun, Chao, 1979- |
| Thesis advisor | Egan, Ronald, 1948- |
| Thesis advisor | Matsumoto, Yoshiko, 1954- |
| Degree committee member | Egan, Ronald, 1948- |
| Degree committee member | Matsumoto, Yoshiko, 1954- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Hsin Hung Yeh |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Hsin Hung Yeh
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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