A Corpus-Based Study Of Syntax And Semantics Of "Xialai" And "Xiaqu"

As a pair of directional verbs in Mandarin Chinese,“xialai” and “xiaqu” havemany similarities. Previous studies have paid much attention to the analysis of theirsemantics. Researchers mainly concentrate on features and classification of theirmeanings. On the study of syntax, scholars just describe sentence patterns in which“xialai” and “xiaqu” appear without any persuasive explanation.Based on the large amount of linguistic data coming from Center for ChineseLinguistics PKU (CCL), this paper reclassifies the meaning from two dimensions—space and time by taking displacement as criteria. Through the analysis, it is shownthat “xialai” and “xiaqu” cannot be interchanged entirely, or they are not suitable toexchange with each other, or they can be interchanged flexibly according to differentconditions. Therefore, we try to work out the constraint of the appearance of “xialai”and “xiaqu” used as complements in sentences from the interface of syntax andsemantics, and probe the motivation from cognitive linguistic view.This paper works on constraints of semantics and syntax of “xialai” and “xiaqu”by investigating three circumstances of the interchange of these two directional verbs.It is shown that different semantic features of these two words play an important rolein whether they can interchange with each other or not. In the perspective ofboundedness and unboundedness,“xialai” has the end point, which means it isbounded; meanwhile,“xiaqu” has no end point, so it is unbounded. They can justmatch with their corresponding bounded or unbounded elements. Subjectification alsoworks in the process. When the viewpoint of the observation is presupposed, we preferto choose “xialai” or “xiaqu” respectively according to different perspectives. Whenspatiality is weakened in semantics, which means that the objectivity becomes weakwhile subjectivity becomes strong,“xialai” and “xiaqu” can exchange flexibly withoutaffecting the sentence meaning. The research shows that semantics is the mostfoundamental part of language which determines syntactic distribution to some extentand that language-using cannot be separated from cognitive ability of human-beings.Semantic features of boundedness and unboundedness and different perspectives ofobservation lead people to select “xialai” or “xiaqu” under different circumstances.