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Chinese Language and Discourse: Online-First Articles

Mandarin posture verbs

Cardinality, patterns of usage, and constructional preferences

ORCID logo | Monash University | University of Alberta
ORCID logo | Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
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 × Locative
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Data availability
  • Notes
  • The following abbreviations are used in the glosses
  • Author queries
  • References
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