A Study Of Chinese ‘Meeting Type' Of Reciprocal Verbs

‘Meeting type' of reciprocal verbs is a kind of comm on verbs in language.However,comprehensive studies related to them have not been found at present.This paper describes the use of ‘M eeting type' of reciprocal verbs such as “ Yu”,“Feng”,“Zao”,“Zhi”,“Zhuang”,“Peng” in different types ofliterature during the ancient times and m edieval period as we ll as modern tim es by analyzing a lar ge number of statistics.The main contents of this paper are: firstly,the changes of the frequency use of m eeting verbs in dif ferent types of historical literature;secondly,the different positions of them in the sem antic field;thirdly,the combination and replacement of each wo rd and so on.From theancient times to the Qin g Dynasty,“ Yu” performed actively in the semantic field of “ Xiang Yu”,“Zhi” appeared in the late period of ancient Chinese-speaking time while was widely used in the Medieval Chinese.“Zhuang” was given the m eaning of“meeting” in the late period of Northern Song Dynasty.As for “ Peng”,it was supposed to be in the late Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty.Then,this paper analyzes the usage of ‘Meetin g type' of reciprocal verbs appeared in the Beijin g Spoken Language Corpus Query System and som e contemporary Chinese literature works.In addition,the distribution of these m eeting verbs in Chines e dialects can also be obtained in this paper.At present,the most common m orphemes of ‘Meeting type' of reciprocal verbs in Chinese are “Peng”,“Yu” and “Zhuang”,while the most familiar affixes are “Zhe”,“Dao”,“Shang” and so forth.On the basis of diachronic description and synchronic distribution,th is paper com bs the extend ed meaning of Chinese ‘Meeting type' of reciprocal verbs with similarities by giving lots of examples: the original meaning of “Xiang Yu” developed into “ Zaoshou” and then to express the passive meaning;another example is from the meaning of “ Xiang Yu” evolved into the meaning of “ Dang” or “ Dui”.At the sam e time,it com bs the generality of Chinese verbs which can be extend ed to the meaning of “Xiang Yu”,for example,a large number of verbs with the m eaning of “Dang” or “Dui” obtained the meaning of “Xiang Yu”;some verbs with the meaning of “Chu” or“Peng”,“Ying”or “Hui” got the meaning of “Xiang Yu”.Additionally,the word “Ou” also obtained the meaning of “Xiang Yu” by the way of analogy.Finally,this paper attem pts to draw the Semantic Map on ‘Meeting type' of recipr ocal verbs to show the evolutionary directions and patterns of these verbs' lexical m eanings.Moreover,the Map can present the semantic system as well as th e differences and similarities among each ‘Meeting type' of reciprocal verb in Chinese.