Abstract
In this study, we examine the variations in the alternative pattern of light verb construction between Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin, based on a large-scale comparable corpora statistical approach. The results show that these two variants display significant differences in preference for introducing the theme of the taken complement of the light verb, and Taiwan light verb significantly favors two specific alternations: e.g., 进行对可行性研究 jinxing dui kexingxing yanjiu, 进行研究可行性 jinxing yanjiu kexingxing ‘to conduct research on practicability’. Moreover, we have also shown that some linguistic factors influence the alternations’ choices: e.g., the complexity of the theme. Based on the observations, we further argue that the specific alternations in Taiwan indicate the different syntactic types of light verb complements in the two language variations.
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Jiang, M., Huang, CR. (2023). Variations in Alternative Pattern of Light Verb Construction Between Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin. In: Su, Q., Xu, G., Yang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13495. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28953-8_24
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