Abstract
Prosody plays an important role in Chinese studies. This can be observed not only in word building but also in constructions’ formation. By analyzing the 1120 results of the “fei X bu ke” construction via the BCC corpus, it is discovered that no matter from the amount of use or from the average frequency of use of the construction, the quadrisyllabic “fei X bu ke” construction takes a dominant position, that is, the monosyllabic X is preferred to form the construction. In order to explicate the reason, this paper attempts to analyze the preference of syllables of X in the “fei X bu ke” construction from the perspective of prosody.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper, “|” signifies the division of syntactic structure and “#” is used to segment prosodic foot. “|” alone means that the syntactic structures and the prosodic foot overlap with each other. “#” is used when any inappropriateness shows up. Besides, “*” is used to signify that the pause in the phrase or word is unacceptable.
- 2.
This phrase comes from Chao (1968). Chao caught sight of a board which read “无肺病牛 wu fei bing niu”, which had the meaning of “bulls without lung diseases”. However, many people who caught sight of it may utter it as “无肺-病牛 wu fei-bing niu”, which has a meaning roughly interpreted as “infected bulls without lungs”. In actual fact, under such specific context, though this phrase was uttered with a two-character rhythm, people realized the ungrammaticality of such mode of utterance and re-uttered the phrase as “无-肺病牛 wu-fei bing niu” right away. This can also serve as a piece of evidence for the phenomena such as “鸟兽散 niao shou san” that show up later in this paper, a rejection exerted by the semantic meanings toward prosody.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the anonymous CLSW reviewers for their comments of the argumentation and language in this paper. The usual disclaimers apply. The study is supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences by the Ministry of Education (14YJC740115).
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Zhang, P., Wang, L., Sun, W. (2018). On the Condition of X in “fei X bu ke” Constructions. 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_29
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