A Corpus-based Approach To The Pattern Of Y?u+NP+VP In Mandarin Chinese

Y?u+NP+VP is an important structure in studies of Y?u sentence in modern Chinese.Complicated syntactic and semantic relations between elements in this structure make it difficult for previous researchers to conduct an empirical analysis on this structure.As a methodology for describing a language,Pattern Grammar observes concordance lines of a pattern from large-scale corpora and analyzes lexical items that cooccur with it.By classifying lexical items that cooccur with a pattern into several meaning groups,Pattern Grammar summarizes semantic meanings that are strongly associated with a pattern as well as its typical usages.It fully describes a pattern and provides a new perspective and a new methodology when it comes to semantic analysis of a pattern.Based on a 2.2-million-word Spoken and Written Corpus of Mandarin Chinese,the present study follows the approach proposed by Pattern Grammar to describe linguistic phenomenon and investigates semantic features in the pattern of y?u+NP+VP across different registers.By extracting the intended pattern of y?u+NP+VP,this thesis calculates lexical items that cooccur with this pattern,whose semantic features are annotated with semantic tags in New TONGYICI Thesaurus.KH-coder is utilized to identify semantic tags that have stronger cooccurrence.Meanwhile,SPSS is also utilized to find out three pairs of variables that are significantly correlated with each other,which confirms the interaction of semantic meanings and registers.Differences in this pattern's distribution across two registers are also investigated to analyze the interaction between lexical items,pattern,semantic meanings and register.The present study analyzes the above findings from the perspective of interaction between meaning and structure,and interaction between the pattern's typical usages and situational context of a register.The results show that(1)the pattern of y?u+NP+VP associates with a limited number of meaning groups and has preference for some of them: NP is more likely to be the semantic group of human being while VP tends to be the semantic groups of social activities and physical behavior;(2)NP's meaning groups demonstrate a significant correlation with VP's meaning groups.For instance,when NP refers to human being,VP has a tendency to indicate psychological activities;The distribution of semantic groups,together with pattern variation across registers,reveals that a typical usage in the pattern of y?u+NP+VP is narration of events,including description of characters and scenes.To be more specific,the description of human being's or an entity's social activities,psychological activities and physical behavior;(3)register also influences distribution of this pattern in the corpus as well as NP's and VP's meaning groups.This pattern is mostly seen in fictions(as in the written register),Chinese folk art,debate and edited oral narratives(as in the spoken register).In addition,NP usually refers to abstract entities in the written register and refers to human being in the spoken register.All the results demonstrate that a pattern interacts with meanings and its typical usage is strongly related to specialized registers that share the same communicative purpose,which reflects the association between pattern,meaning and function.This study supports conclusions of y?u+NP+VP drawn by previous researchers with empirical evidence retrieved from the corpus.On the other hand,the innovation of this study lies in the application of an ontological method in classifying meanings associated with the pattern and the application of cooccurrence network to track typical usages of a pattern.It confirms a hypothesis in Pattern Grammar that meaning and structure are corelated.This research also discusses pattern variation across registers,giving a detailed description of linguistic features in y?u+NP+VP,which adds a new analytical dimension of pragmatic usage to studies of y?u+NP+VP and therefore is theoretically significant.Additionally,the present study is practically significant in that it provides the co-occurring wordlists of the pattern y?u+NP+VP for teachers who teach Chinese to foreigners and Chinese-learning students of another language.