Semantic Prosody: The Study of Gei in BA and BEI Constructions

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.