On the evolutionary mechanism of disyllabic transitive verbs
论汉语双音节动宾式及物动词的演化机制
Li Yanzhi 李艳芝; Wu Yicheng 吴义诚
Abstract 摘要
In Modern Chinese, there is an increasing number of disyllabic transitive verbs in the structural configuration [Vo] where o can be a nominal, a verbal or an adjectival morpheme, such as观光 (guānguāng: lit.‘see sight’) ‘sightsee’, 投资 (tóuzī: lit. ‘throw money’) ‘invest’, 留心 (liúxīn: lit. ‘leave heart’) ‘be careful of’ and注意 (zhùyì: lit. ‘focus attention’) ‘concentrate on’. These compound verbs can take another element as their objects and yield expressions in the structural configuration [Vo1+O2]. From an evolutionary perspective, this corpus-based study attempts to explicate the syntactic as well as the semantic mechanisms behind the formation and interpretation of disyllabic transitive verbs. It is pointed out that (i) the [VN+O2] type, which has the largest number, goes through threeevolutional phases during which Noun Incorporation plays a crucial role; (ii) the [Vv+O2] type is a nested complex structure, in which v is the object of V and is mostly transitive and hence capable to take one more object; (iii) although the above mentioned two types of compound verbs have different evolutional processes and mechanisms, they both indicate that there is a possibility that verbs can be converted from intransitive to transitive.
Subject Keywords 主题词
Disyllabic verb 双音节动词 Object 宾语 Transitivity 及物性 Evolution 演化机制 Noun incorporation 名词兼并
Journal of Chinese Linguistics vol.45, no.2 (June 2017): 344-393
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