Copyright 2016 Junghwan Maeng
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CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository Copyright 2016 Junghwan Maeng DAO AS A VERBAL SUFFIX IN CHINESE VERBS BY JUNGHWAN MAENG THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in East Asian Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016 Urbana, Illinois Adviser: Professor Jerome Packard Abstract This thesis focuses on the resultative ending dao as a suffix to Chinese verbs. Although dao is commonly understood as a mono-morphemic verb, a preposition or a verbal complement, little attention has been given to its function as a verbal suffix. This study attempts to highlight the inflectional nature of dao first by elaborating its differences from the virtually synonymous resultative ending jian in the case of perception verbs. Based on a stativity test proposed by Lakoff (1965), it was able to prove that dao has more inflectional features compared to the jian counterpart as it shows higher compatibility with intentionality adverbs and more natural occurrences in imperative contexts. However, since the initial research only deals with a limited amount of perception verbs that allow both jian and dao as a resultative ending, it is insufficient to prove whether dao actually operates as a verbal suffix in other types of perception verbs. Thus, a wider range of perception verbs that do not take jian but dao as a resultative ending were analyzed to explore dao’s inflectional nature to Chinese perception verbs. Using Vendler’s verb classification (1965) and corpus data analysis, it was able to show that dao is the most frequent grammatical morpheme to occur directly after perception verbs and has a function of assigning the feature of achievement verb to the entire verb compound. Furthermore, this thesis also discusses novel dao use in internet language where dao is being infixed in V-O compounds verbs. Chen and Tao (2014) argue for dao’s function as a transitivity marker by going through the examples of exteneded dao usages in contemporary Chinese language. Yet, the examples where dao co-occurs with intransitive compound verbs indicate that dao is not merely a transitivity marker, but behaves as a grammatical morpheme ii that increases the sense of achievement without drastically altering the meaning of the entire compound verb just as it does to perception verbs. Given the researches all put together, this paper highlights dao being grammaticalized into a verbal suffix in contemporary Chinese language. iii Table of Contents List of Tables ...................................................................................................................................v 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................................1 2. Comparison of Jian and Dao in the Case of Perception Verbs ...................................................3 2.1. Introduction ...........................................................................................................................3 2.2. Liu’s Comparative Study on V-jian and V-dao ....................................................................4 2.3. Comparing V-jian and V-dao ...............................................................................................7 3. Dao as a Verbal Suffix in the Case of Perception Verbs ...........................................................16 3.1. Introduction .........................................................................................................................16 3.2. Dao as a Verbal Suffix ........................................................................................................16 3.3. Head of V-dao Perception Verbs ........................................................................................19 3.4. Corpus Data Analysis ..........................................................................................................25 3.5. Summary .............................................................................................................................31 4. Dao as a Verbal Suffix in a Broader Range of Contexts ...........................................................33 4.1. Introduction .........................................................................................................................33 4.2. Literature Review on Chen and Tao (2014) ........................................................................35 4.3. V+dao+O Compound Verb .................................................................................................39 4.4. Summary .............................................................................................................................46 5. Concluding Comments...............................................................................................................48 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................50 Appendix ........................................................................................................................................52 iv List of Tables Table 1: Dictionary Interpretations of Jian and Dao .......................................................................4 Table 2: Compatibility of Kanjian and Kandao with Intentionality Adverbs .................................9 Table 3: Compatibility of Kanjian and Kandao with Imperative Auxiliary Verbs .......................11 Table 4: Frequency List of Morphemes after Mono-Morphemic Perception Verbs .....................27 Table 5: Frequency List of Morphemes after Dimorphemic Perception Verbs .............................29 v 1. Introduction Chinese is widely known as an isolating language having very little inflection operating on its words. However, Chinese actually has a non-trivial number of grammatical morphemes that realize inflection processes on its words. Besides noun suffixes such as -men, -zi, -tou, and etc, Chinese also has some verbal suffixes that operate as aspectual markers. These verbal suffixes include -le, -zhe and -guo, and usually entail the result or completion of the action denoted by the verb they attach to. Unlike many resultative endings such as –jian ‘to perceive’, - wan ‘to finish’, and –dong ‘to understand’, all of which are also used to denote the result or completion of the action, the verbal suffixes do not percolate their meaning up to the compound verbs they form, but only perform morphological operation as grammatical markers. Such features of verbal suffixes are known to have resulted from grammaticalization, which causes their original meaning to be bleached to a great degree leaving only grammatical functions behind. Since grammaticalization is a linguistic process that occurs over an extended period of time, it is difficult to measure the extent to which it is in the middle of an on-going process. These new language usages usually occur outside the boundary of canonical usages, so they sometimes disappear into the background of linguistic history unless they are officially recognized as proper language expressions. Despite its relatively short life span, such novel language usages provide us with valuable information about which direction a certain part of language is moving towards if sufficient evidence can be provided. Since the novel language usages originate from canonical usages, it allows linguists to conjecture a path of grammaticalization. 1 Speaking of a novel language usage going through grammaticalization, this paper focuses on dao as a verbal suffix, which has long been understood as a bound root or a preposition. As Chen and Tao (2014) explain, the use of dao in contemporary Chinese has been extended over to the context where it is not necessarily required, and some tokens from a corpus show that they can even attach to prepositions. From these new usages of dao, it can be assumed that there is some kind of synchronic linguistic transformation process underway in contemporary Chinese. As the first step to discuss dao as a verbal suffix, the paper starts with the chapter that explains how dao differs from the bound morpheme jian. Since dao and jian are considered virtually synonymous in case of some perception verbs, it is appropriate to compare the two resultative endings to identify distinctions between them in order to highlight inflectional nature of dao. Since the first chapter only deals with certain perception verbs that allow both jian and dao as resultative ending, the next chapter extends the range of research over to other perception verbs, for which dao but not jian is available as a verbal ending, to stress that the former is more than a bound root as far as perception verbs are concerned. The final chapter then talks about the extended usages of dao in the contemporary Chinese based on internet language use in which dao is used to operationalize inflection on the Chinese V-O compound. 2 2. Comparison of Jian and Dao in the Case of Perception Verbs 2.1. Introduction Among many resultative complements that share similar meanings, jian ‘to perceive’ and dao ‘to arrive’ are particularly difficult to distinguish from one another in term of their usages when combined with perception verbs. For example, kandao ‘to see’ and kanjian ‘to see’ are both translated into the same expression as the examples shown