A Study On "NP+V-qi Lai+AP" In Chinese

The “v-qi lai” sentence pattern in Chinese has always been a topic of debate in the studyof Chinese grammar, on which scholars have conducted thorough research. Influenced bythe achievements of the “middle construction” theory from abroad, researchers started to payclose attention to this sort of structure in Chinese. They discussed whether or not “middleconstruction” exists in Chinese. Some scholars think that “NP+V-qi lai+AP” is the basicstructural type in Chinese middle construction, but there still exists controversy about theChinese middle construction and its form of expression.Based on the collection of research on “middle construction”, this article analyzes the“NP+V-qi lai+AP” pattern in modern Chinese. The analysis is based on the corpus of thecenter for Chinese linguistics PKU (network edition), and is assisted by the corpus of theinstitute of applied linguistic ministry of education. Both the general tendency andexceptions of the phenomenon are carefully examined. Comparing this languagephenomenon both in English and Chinese, this paper analyzes the distribution of “NP+V-qilai+AP” in Chinese according to the characteristics of Chinese grammar, and explores itshierarchical structural features, starting with the grammaticalization of “v-qi lai”. Finally,this paper further analyzes its generative mechanism by using transformational generativegrammar, which plays a role in understanding Chinese middle construction and handling“NP+V-qi lai+AP”.