A Study Of Neutrality In The Choice Of "Eat" And "Drink" Object In Modern Chinese

“Eat” and “drink” are the two most typical verbs used to express dietary actions in modern Chinese,with strong collocation ability and high frequency of use.In the study of the verb “eat” and “drink”,previous studies have paid little attention to the conventional object collocated with “eat” and “drink”.Through the investigation of the corpus,it is found that in the conventional object collocation of “eat” and “drink”,the same word can be used as either the object of “eat” or the object of “drink” with “eat”.There are many such phenomena,such as “drinking water”,“drinking water”,“drinking milk”,“taking medicine”,“drinking medicine”,“eating vinegar”,“drinking vinegar”,and so on.Based on a detailed observation and description of the linguistic expression of “eat”and “drink” in modern Chinese,this article,on the one hand,examines the neutralization phenomenon of the object carried by “eat” and “drink” from the syntactic,semantic,and pragmatic levels,respectively;on the other hand,it focuses on analyzing the neutralization phenomenon of “eating” and “drinking” in the selection of typical objects,summarizing the types of “eating” and “drinking” in the selection of typical objects,and analyzing the causes behind them.The full text consists of seven chapters:The first chapter is an introduction,which mainly describes the significance of the topic,the definition of research objects and terms,the current research situation,theoretical basis,research methods,and corpus sources.The second chapter observes the syntactic plane of “eating” and “drinking” in terms of neutralization.Firstly,from the perspective of parts of speech,this paper examines the neutralization of the object in “eat” and “drink”;secondly,it analyzes the causes of the structural types and neutralization of the objects carried by “eat” and “drink” from the perspectives of semantic formation patterns and semantic characteristics.The third chapter analyzes the neutralization of the semantic plane of the object carried by the verb “eat” and “drink”,and examines the semantic types formed by “eat” and “drink”and the object,focusing on the analysis of the patient object from three aspects: structural type,semantic category,and semantic distribution.The fourth chapter makes a statistical analysis of the typicality of “eat” and “drink”with objects,combines prototype category theory with the semantic characteristics of verb“eat” and “drink”,summarizes the priority sequence of “eat” and “drink” in the semantic selection of objects,and explores the characteristics of verb “eat” and “drink” in the semantic selection of objects.The fifth chapter classifies and analyzes the phenomenon of neutralization in the selection of typical objects in “eating” and “drinking”,combining with the generative lexicon theory,and analyzes the reasons for the phenomenon from different perspectives.The sixth chapter discusses the neutralization of the pragmatic plane of the object “eat”and “drink”,and analyzes it from four aspects: adverbial,complement,emotional meaning,and sentence structure.The seventh chapter is the conclusion,which summarizes the views of the full text and points out the inadequacies of the study.