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A Cognitive Study on Modern Chinese Construction “V-lai-V-qu”

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11173))

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Abstract

As a commonly-used construction in modern Chinese, X-lai (come)-X-qu (go) comes from classical Chinese and it is still widely used in both oral and written Chinese today. In this paper we focus primarily on the construction where two Xs belong to the same monosyllable verb (V-lai-V-qu). Based on previous studies, we use theories of cognitive linguistics to explain the syntactic and semantic features of this construction, as well as the different frequencies of its variants. We hope this study can bring new insights to the exploration of cognitive mechanisms in researches of the similar Chinese verbal constructions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The case where “lai” and “qu” are interchangeable in “V-lai-V-qu” (V is monosyllabic) has the number of 2278 out of 5897 (about 38.6%) cases in BCC Corpus, while the number of “V-qu-V-lai” (V is monosyllabic) is only 97 out of 380 (25.5%) cases in BCC Corpus, among these 97 cases, “lai” and “qu” are interchangeable most of the time.

  2. 2.

    Even if we only find 5 corresponding cases in BCC Corpus, some verbs like “da (hit)”, “xiang (think)”, “ai (love)”, “tui (push)”, “ku (cry)”, “jiang (speak)”, “fan (grub)” and so forth, can be found in the spoken Chinese online, this shows that people tend to use this pattern to emphasize the repetitive action represented by the V-element.

  3. 3.

    By searching for relative cases in BCC modern Chinese corpus we find that the total number of frequencies of “A-lai-A-qu” and “N-lai-N-qu” is no more than 400 but the number of “V-lai-V-qu” is almost 2200. However, we can also see some “A-lai-A-qu” constructions like “ming (bright)-lai-an (dark)-qu”, “qiao (artful)-lai-miao (artful)-qu”, “gao (high)-lai-di (low)-qu”, etc., and some “N-lai-N-qu” constructions like “zhao (morning)-lai-mu (evening)-qu”, “si (silk)-lai-xian (thread)-qu”, “chun (spring)-lai-dong (winter)-qu” in classical Chinese corpus.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, USA

    Xiaolong Lu

Authors
  1. Xiaolong Lu
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Correspondence to Xiaolong Lu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  2. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qi Su

  3. National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan

    Jiun-Shiung Wu

Abbreviations

1SG

1st person singular

1PL

1st person plural

2SG

2nd person singular

2PL

2nd person plural

3SG

3rd person singular

3PL

3rd person plural

PREP

Preposition

CL

Classifier

PST

Past tense

NEG

Negator

PASS

passive

IMP

Imperfective

EM

Emphasis marker

EXP

Experiential

Q

Question Marker

MOOD

Modal particle

SUO

Functional particle suo

BA

Ba-construction

BEI

Bei-construction

RVC

Resultative Verb Complement

C

Complimentizer de

CRS

Current Relevant State le

PFV

Perfective le

ASSOC

Associative de

CSC

Complex stative construction de

ATTR

Attributive de

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Lu, X. (2018). A Cognitive Study on Modern Chinese Construction “V-lai-V-qu”. In: Hong, JF., Su, Q., Wu, JS. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11173. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04014-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04015-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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