A Study On Peripheral Verb-copying Constructions In Mandarin Chinese

Verb copying sentence is a distinctive sentence structure in Chinese.Its typical format is generally summarized as “VO+VC”.A lot of researches have been conducted on the generative mechanism of verb copying sentences at home and abroad.There are mainly two views on the generation of verb copying sentences at home,the binbuzhengdong “both the object and complement need be adjacent to the verb” perspective and the function of language perspective.There are also mainly two views on the generation of verb copying sentences abroad,the Formal Linguistics perspective and the Cognitive Linguistics perspective.Some researches on the generative mechanism of verb copying sentence have found the similarity among “VOVde”construction,“VOLV” construction and verb copying construction,and called the former two the peripheral formats of verb copying construction.In recent years,the research direction has gradually turned to the generative mechanism of the peripheral formats of verb copying sentence.We expand the adverbial of the “VOLV” construction from the original adverbial of time and place to a wider scope,which can be recorded as “VOXV”.We also supplement another peripheral construction of verb copying sentences,which can be recorded as “Yi V jiu VC”.Thus,the research objective is to analyze the above three peripheral formats of verb copying sentence by virtue of the Baseline /Elaboration Organization.This research will solve the following three questions:(1)What are the formal representation,construction meaning of the peripheral formats of verb copying construction?(2)Can Baseline/Elaboration Theory be applied to explain the generative mechanism of the peripheral formats of verb copying construction?(1)From the perspective of formal representation,“VOVde” verb copying construction belongs to idiom(partially filled),with variables “V”,“O” and invariable “de”.“VOXV” verb copying construction belongs to idiom(unfilled),with variables “V”,“O” and “X”.“Yi V jiu VC” verb copying construction belongs to idiom(partially filled),with variables “Yi V” and “C”,and invariable “jiu”.These three constructions are closely relevant to the causative “VOVDe C”verb copying construction,“VOLV” construction and “Yi X jiu Y” construction respectively.(2)From the perspective of construction meaning,the overall construction meaning of“VOVde” is to confirm and attribute facts,and the semantic focus is the verb object structure“VO”.The overall construction meaning of “VOXV” is to highlight the state of the action,and the semantic focus is the adverbial element embedded in the construction.The overall construction meaning of “Yi V jiu VC” is to emphasize the degree and result of action,and the semantic focus is the verb complement structure “VC”.(3)From the perspective of generative mechanism,The verbs in “VO” and “Yi V” have been deverbalized.After deverbalization,they can assume the function of declaration and reference,becoming a fact that can be limited,described and evaluated.Thus,the precomponent can be filled by the declarative and referential elements,which is the baseline structure in the organization located before the verb complement structure.The reason for copying verbs is to avoid the failure of establishing syntactic-semantic connections and ambiguous construction meanings.