| In Modern Chinese,"VVkan" is neither a form of verbal phrases nor verb duplication.Thus,we come up with an opinion that "VVkan" can be regarded as a new construction.The dissertation discusses the semantic meaning of "VVkan",as well as its syntactic performance and pragmatic functions.From a diachronic aspect,the dissertation goes through the possible formation of"VVkan".It is found that the origin of "VVkan" is "kan" which means testing.Then the Chinese language has witnessed the combination of "shi" and "kan","shi kan"and "shi VP kan".When it came to Qing Dynasty,the usage of "VVkan" almost became a fixed form which has extended meanings of "attemption" and "judgement".From a synchronic angle,the dissertation is on the construction "VVkan" by the instruction of Goldberg’s Construction Grammar Approach.We pick up 1301 meanings of single-syllabled Chinese verbs from Hanyu Dongci Yongfa Cidian(1999)as the object of this research.And we put these verbal meanings into Modern Chinese corpus to find out the distribution of "VVkan".By summing up these results,we acquire the semantic attributes of "V" and "kan".What’s more,we get the constructional meanings of "VVkan" which mean the speaker,listener or the third party is going to attempt to do something or vertify the result of the event by doing something.The event represented by "VVkan" may have three phrases which are P1,P2 and P3.P1 and P2 are corresponding to the phrase attempting to do something,while P2 and P3 are vertifying the result by doing something.When studying the internal semantic meaning of "VVkan",we find that the single verbs in "VVkan" have three main semantic attributes which are "separable or not","volitional or not" and "directional or not".And the influence on "VVkan" is successively decreasing from the first attribute to the last.The intrinsic semantic meaning of "kan" is "to explore something".It has two inferior meanings which are"to attempt" and "to judge".The number of "VVkan" made up of Ⅰ a and Ⅰ b verbs is almost the same.The attribute of "directional or not" makes these two types different.While "VVkan" with II type verbs has at least one semantic attribute so that there is no certain attribute helping to define different types of verbs.However,when the single verbs satisfy the attributes of both "separable or not" and "volitional or not",they have the largest proportion of all the verbs that can form "VVkan".From the perspective of absolute time,the event of "VVkan" can actually happen or not happen,which belongs to "real modality".While when the event of "VVkan" can not be identified whether it will happen or not,we hold that it has "unreal modality".Generally,"VVkan" in a single sentence shows the unreal situation.If we learn more about the context of "VVkan",the event may be identified as a real situation based on available contextual evidence.In addition,when the unreal modality of "VVkan"becomes prominent,its semantic meaning will be weakened.At this moment,"VVkan"acts as the function of reminding or paying attention. |
