The Role of Force in Mandarin Verbs of Cutting

Abstract

本文探究切類相關動詞的語義內涵。主要的研究目標是探究語義特徵「力道」是否該納入在某些漢語切類動詞的語義本質上。研究內容包含十個常用「切」概念的動詞，如「切、削、剁、割、砍、剖、雕、劈、刻、剪」等，透過線上問卷實驗與語料庫分析，本研究結果顯示(1)母語者最常使用的四個分類依據，分別是「工具」、「(藝術)精細化」、「力道」、和「結果（一分為二）」；(2)「劈、砍、剁」三個動詞為母語者認為最常與語義元素「力道」相關的切類動詞；(3)語料庫的分析結果支持本研究關於「動補結構互補分佈」之假設。結果呈現動詞「砍」常與補語「斷」共現；另外，「剁」與「碎」常共現，而力道大的動詞「劈」則較常與補語「開」（一分為二）出現。本研究結果不但支持以使用基礎頻率為本的語言理論觀 (Barlow and Kemmer 2000)，且亦能對漢語動補的常用結合關係，提供不同的分析結果與建議。

This study explores the semantic meaning of verbs of cutting in Mandarin; it also investigates whether the semantic component FORCE should be included in the denotation for distinguishing the fine-grained meanings among Mandarin verbs, including “diāo, qiē, xuè(xiāo), duò, gē, kǎn, kē, jiǎn, pī and pǒ”, broadly subsumed under the category of the CUT action events in English. To probe this issue, an on-line questionnaire was used along with a corpus-based analysis of cutting verbs with the following results. Firstly, the most commonly-used implicit categories that Mandarin native speakers use are INSTRUMENT, FORCE, DELICATENESS, and RESULT (SEPARATION). Secondly, based on the frequency of the participants’ chosen words on FORCE-related items, kǎn (100%), duò (89%) and pī (86%) are the top three verbs used with respect to the semantic feature of FORCE. Lastly, the corpus analysis supports the hypothesis of V-C complementary distribution in native speakers’ usage. The preliminary findings support the usage-based view of language (Barlow and Kemmer 2000) and can shed light on the cognitive constraint that implicitly and regularly appears in speakers’ resultative compound usages.