A Corpus-Based Study On Chinese Ba Construction—A Collostructional Analysis

Ba construction is a type of sentence pattern that is frequently seen in modern Chinese.Lots of research results have been achieved concerning various aspects of it.However,studies of Ba construction are chiefly limited to the use of introspective method,bringing a large number of qualitative research results but less quantitative ones.Moreover,the collostructional relationship and collostructional strength between verbs that enter into Ba construction and the construction itself are neglected in most cases.The development of Construction Grammar has provided a new perspective for the study of Ba construction.The quantitative approach of collostructional analysis is intended to explore the distribution of constructional meanings by comparing the collostructional strength between verbs in the slot and the construction itself.This method has strong explanatory power to language phenomenon,so it is of great significance when applied to the study of Ba construction.Based on drawbacks of previous studies,this study aims to explore the collostructional relationship and strength between verbs and Ba construction and further analyze the collostructional meaning of Ba construction.The study is designed to answer the following questions:1)What types of verbs are strongly attracted to Ba construction? How verbs and Chinese Ba construction interact and fuse with each other?2)What is the prototypical semantics of Ba construction? Is the “disposal meaning” or “causative meaning” advocated strongly by previous scholars the typical semantics of Chinese Ba construction?3)How is the polysemous semantic network of Ba construction formed? What is the cognitive mechanism and motivation?The corpus selected is the Contemporary Chinese Corpus of the State Language Commission.The Chinese character “Ba” is regarded as the retrieval word and Ba constructions are defined by combining automatic retrieval and artificial elimination.Verbs that co-occur with Ba constructions are listed with frequencies being counted.Then,the collostructional strength is computed with the help of Coll.analysis 3.2a and R software.Major findings of this study are as follows:1)The classification of top 100 verb collexemes mainly falls into three conceptual categories,denoting “disposal”(61%),“displacement”(25%)and “subjective causitivity”(24%)respectively.The Semantic Coherence Principle and the Correspondence Principle dominate the interaction and fusion between verbs and Ba construction.Also,the relationship between verbs and Ba construction is represented by elaborations,force-dynamic relation,preconditions and mental connections,of which the elaboration is the most prototypical and common one.2)The prototypical semantics of Ba construction expresses A's disposal of B,which usually involves transition between two states or a resultative state.What's more,it is also found that Ba construction denotes the meaning of displacement and subjective causitivity.Semantic characteristics of “disposal”,“displacement” and “causativity” found by previous scholars have been confirmed in this study.But unlike those studies,the present study is backed up by the authentic data retrieved from a large and balanced corpus and the analysis is based on the collostructional strength between verbs and construction.3)The polysemous semantic network of Ba construction mainly relies on the polysemy link of inheritance relations.These three types all involve the transition between two states of affairs of patient.The cognitive mechanism and motivation of Ba construction is inseparable from the contribution made by the Chinese character “Ba”,interaction and fusion between verbs and Ba construction as well as inheritance relations among different types of Ba construction.The quantitative method of collostructional analysis is an update of traditional corpus research method,which increases the accuracy of the exploration of colllostructional meanings.Corpus-based quantitative research methods should be further employed to the investigation of Ba construction.Besides,as the collostructional analysis has relatively strong explanatory power to linguistic phenomenon and makes the semantic analysis more scientific and effective,it can be used to the future explorations of other constructions.