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Part of
New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax: Studies in honor of Yen-Hui Audrey Li
Edited by Andrew Simpson
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 272] 2022
► pp. 555–574

Predicting the unpredictable

‑le used in Chinese serial verb constructions

| University of Kansas

This study investigates the use of the perfective aspect marker –le in Chinese serial verb constructions through an analysis of 386 serial verb constructions selected from the Sinica Corpus. The analysis takes into account the position of –le, the form of the object co-occurring with –le, and the semantic relationships between VP1 and VP2. The results indicate that –le is used predominately with VP1, that the primary semantic relationship between VP1 and VP2 is “consecutive”, and that quantified objects occur more frequently than definite objects or bare noun objects in VPs containing –le. Understanding the semantic relationship between VP1 and VP2 can enable Chinese learners to predict where and when to use –le correctly in an SVC.

Article outline
  • 0.Introduction
  • 1.Scope of the study of serial verb constructions (SVCs)
  • 2.Studies on –le used in SVC
  • 3.Corpus study
    • 3.1Research questions
    • 3.2Data collection and coding
    • 3.3Results
      • 3.3.1The distribution of –le in VP1 and VP2
      • 3.3.2The form of the element after the verb that is suffixed with –le
      • 3.3.3Semantic relationships between VP1 and VP2
    • 3.4Discussion
  • 4.Conclusion and pedagogical implications
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 April 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.272.20li
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