Article published In:
Chinese Language and Discourse: Online-First ArticlesMandarin posture verbs
Cardinality, patterns of usage, and constructional preferences
Posture verbs have attracted considerable interest within Cognitive Linguistics. This study continues this line of
research by investigating usage-based patterns associated with these verbs when used in their literal posture senses. The data for
the study comes from the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese and the CALLHOME Mandarin Corpus. We investigate the frequencies and
distributions of the Mandarin posture verbs 坐
zuò ‘sit’, 站
zhàn ‘stand’, and 躺
tǎng ‘lie’ in four construction types: directional constructions, aspectual
suffixes, serial verb constructions, and locative constructions. The analysis confirms the primacy of zuò, zhàn,
and tǎng and, among other results, reveals a significant absence of locative phrases with the dynamic forms of
the verbs as used with directionals.
Keywords: posture, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, construction, motivation
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Data
- 3.Cardinality of zuò, zhàn, and tǎng
- 4.Constructional usage
- 4.1Directionals
- 4.2Aspect
- 4.3Serial verb constructions
- 4.4Locatives
- 4.5Discussion of constructional usage
- 5.Directional x Locative
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Data availability
- Notes
-
References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
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