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Semantic Prosody: The Study of Gei in BA and BEI Constructions

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13496))

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Abstract

The spoken word gei in Chinese is often used in the disposal and passive contexts to construct two types of patterns: (i) ba NP gei VP, (ii) and bei NP gei VP. By comparing the distribution of the semantic prosody of the two patterns in corpora, I found that the pattern ba NP gei VP is more likely to be used in positive contexts than the pattern bei NP gei VP, but a negative semantic prosody is dominant in both patterns. The reason is that the meaning of bei NP gei VP as a passive construction was highly associated with negative interpretation in the historical development of BA constructions. The negative meaning of ba NP gei VP emerged late, but “causality” as its constructional meaning gives the negative interpretation in the corpus. From diachronic and synchronic perspectives, I suggest that the study of semantic prosody in Chinese should widen traditional discussions by transferring from synonym comparison to the investigation of widely used phrases or sentence patterns.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The use of gei as a particle has 63103 cases in the spoken Chinese database of the BCC corpus (http://bcc.blcu.edu.cn/zh/search/3/%E7%BB%99v). Our intuition shows that VP following the word gei is often used as a colloquial pattern.

  2. 2.

    The following abbreviations are used in this paper: 1SG = 1st person singular; 1PL = 1st person plural; 2SG = 2nd person singular; 2PL = 2nd person plural; 3SG = 3rd person singular; 3PL = 3rd person plural; ATTR = Attributive de; C = Complementizer de; COMP = Postverbal complement marker de; CL = Classifier; CP = Clause; EM = Emphasis marker; NEG = Negator; NP = Noun phrase; PART = particle gei; PERF: perfective/ perfect marker le; PREP = Preposition; PST = Past tense; S = Sentence final de; VP = Verb phrase; DISP = disposal marker ba; PASS = passive marker bei; PREP = Preposition zai; PN = proper name.

  3. 3.

    See: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B5%A6%E8%B7%AA%E4%BA%86#Chinese.

  4. 4.

    难怪街上这么吵闹, 原来是你们这些家伙到处走来走去。(No wonder such a noisy street, it is you guys who walk back and forth on the street.)

    一身白得象灰面, 松塌塌的, 一点儿无意思, 还装模作态, 这样那样。(The guy’s whole body looks like a block of grey flour, loose and languid, but he behaves in an affected way, doing such-and-such things.)

    (c.f. BCC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of East Asian Studies, The University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

    Xiaolong Lu

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  1. Xiaolong Lu
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Correspondence to Xiaolong Lu .

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  1. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qi Su

  2. Minjiang University, Fuzhou, China

    Ge Xu

  3. Minjiang University, Fuzhou, China

    Xiaoyan Yang

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Lu, X. (2023). Semantic Prosody: The Study of Gei in BA and BEI Constructions. In: Su, Q., Xu, G., Yang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13496. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28956-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28956-9_1

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