Semantic Prosody: The Study of Gei in BA and BEI Constructions
Affiliation
Department of East Asian Studies, The University of ArizonaIssue Date
2023-04-08Metadata
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Springer Nature SwitzerlandCitation
Lu, X. (2023). Semantic Prosody: The Study of Gei in BA and BEI Constructions. In: Su, Q., Xu, G., Yang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13496. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28956-9_1Rights
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AGCollection Information
This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu.Abstract
The spoken word gei in Chinese is often used in the disposal and passive contexts to construct two types of patterns: (i) ba NP gei VP, (ii) and bei NP gei VP. By comparing the distribution of the semantic prosody of the two patterns in corpora, I found that the pattern ba NP gei VP is more likely to be used in positive contexts than the pattern bei NP gei VP, but a negative semantic prosody is dominant in both patterns. The reason is that the meaning of bei NP gei VP as a passive construction was highly associated with negative interpretation in the historical development of BA constructions. The negative meaning of ba NP gei VP emerged late, but “causality” as its constructional meaning gives the negative interpretation in the corpus. From diachronic and synchronic perspectives, I suggest that the study of semantic prosody in Chinese should widen traditional discussions by transferring from synonym comparison to the investigation of widely used phrases or sentence patterns.Note
12 month embargo; first published 08 April 2023ISSN
0302-97439783031289552
9783031289569