A Comparative Study Of Common Verb-Object Collocations In Portuguese And Chinese

This thesis examines the collocational behavior of 109 common verbs extracted from the official HSK level 3 vocabulary list,and comparatively analyzes the verb-object collocations they form in Mandarin Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese,as observed in corpus data and collocation dictionaries.Based on previous research conducted by Beneduzi(2008)and Xinping(2014),this thesis uses both quantitative and qualitative methods in an exploratory research framework.From the theoretical perspectives of Pottier(1978),Cowie(1998),Shen Jiaxuan(2011),and Perini(2017),among other authors,the present research examines verb-noun collocations on three levels,namely morphology,syntax and semantics.It also performs some quantitative analysis on corpus data,and uses the Gini index to compare distributional patterns of collocates in Mandarin Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese.Moreover,some pragmatic and cultural phenomena are briefly discussed.In the morphology section,the thesis discusses the so-called Chinese separable verbs and contrasts them with Portuguese verb-object collocations and compound words.It is proposed that separable verbs and the lexicalization process they undergo are related to the isolating nature of Chinese grammar.As far as syntax is concerned,it is pointed out that Brazilian Portuguese,unlike Mandarin Chinese,possesses a variety of prepositional objects with important distinctions in meaning.Collocations in both languages also display varying degrees and forms of expandability in a sentence.Furthermore,at the semantic level,this work discusses the differences and similarities between verbs in both languages in terms of their semantic field and semantic prosody.One key finding is that both languages not only display so-called light verb constructions,but Mandarin Chinese in particular also displays what we have termed “light nouns”.Quantitative analysis of corpus data shows that the distribution of noun objects in several verb-object collocations is skewed towards certain high-frequency nouns,which are often semantically bleached and perform supporting roles in the sentences in which they appear.Finally,corpus evidence is used to demonstrate how pragmatic and cultural factors can influence verb-noun collocations.The present research is the first to perform a comparative analysis between Mandarin Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese from the perspective of collocations,in particular verb-noun collocations.Its results can be applied in areas such as lexicography and language teaching.