A Contrastive Study On Chinese Non-canonical Verbal Classifier Phrases And Relevant English Constructions

This paper mainly explores the usages of Chinese non-canonical verbal classifierphrases (non-CVCl phrases for short) and then makes a contrastive study on Chinesenon-CVCl phrases and relevant English constructions (RECs for short) that aresemantically and functionally similar to the Chinese non-CVCl phrases.The features of Chinese non-CVCl phrases have not been investigatedsystematically in previous studies. This paper makes a detailed analysis of the semanticfeatures and syntactic distribution of these phrases. It is found that in addition toquantifying events, non-CVCl phrases can also serve the individuation function oftransforming event types into event tokens. Besides, non-CVCl phrases are also of anominal character, which accounts for their relatively strong referential function asopposed to their weak declarative function. In addition, the diversified syntacticdistribution of non-CVCl phrases is also discussed in this paper.With the help of Chinese and English parallel corpus and online resources, thispaper attempts to find out the RECs semantically and functionally analogous to Chinesenon-CVCl phrases and classify these RECs into different groups: light verbconstructions, cognate object constructions, double object constructions and nominaland verbal expressions. An analysis is also made of the features of these classes ofEnglish constructions or expressions. It is found that most of the RECs are related toevent nouns to some degree.Grounded on the above discussion, this paper conducts a contrastive study of theChinese non-CVCl phrases and the RECs, aiming to bring out the differences betweenthem in terms of phrase structure, semantic meaning and syntactic distribution. Thefactors resulting in these differences are analyzed from a cognitive perspective. It isproposed that the differences between the Chinese language and the English language atlarge in perspective positioning and prominence selection, cognitive mechanism andscanning mode constitute the underlying reasons for the different ways of quantifyingevents and denoting actions in the two languages.