An Approximation to Secondary Predication Structure: A Case of V-qilai in Mandarin Chinese

作者：Shyu Shu ing^*; Wang Yu Fang; Lin Zhi Jie

来源：Language and Linguistics, 2013, 14(4): 701-736.

• secondary predication
• inchoative morpheme
• descriptive complement
• resultative complement
• raising construction
• grammaticalization
• subjectification

This study re-examines the widely studied V-qilai 'rise-come' construction in Mandarin Chinese. It first distinguishes V-qilai + predicate construction from the lexical verb qilai and -qilai as a lexical inchoative morpheme, which do not require an additional complement. In addition, three variations of the V-qilai + predicate pattern are identified according to the complement functions: namely (i) a descriptive complement, (ii) an object-oriented descriptive predicate, and (iii) a proposition clause (raising construction). These three variants are subsumed under and accounted for by the proposed uniformed secondary predication structure, while vary with their respective complement structures. In addition, the occurrences of V-qilai were drawn from Academia Sinica Corpus. Based on the above classification, it is shown that there is a far greater preponderance of canonical qilai usages over the V-qilai + complement ones, indicating that the latter patterns are still emerging in the language. In the course of the development, they utilize the secondary predication structure. Hence, the variations of the V-qilai construction should not be treated as being construction specific or idiosyncratic. Thus, the proposed analysis provides a natural and well-motivated account in terms of economy. Moreover, synchronic cline of grammaticality can be correlated with grarnmaticalization and subjectification, as evidenced by the occurrences drawn from corpora of Modern and Early Mandarin Chinese.

• 出版日期2013-7
• 单位中山大学