Chinese Language and Discourse - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015

The present study sets out to construct a semantic network for -kai in Chinese resultative verbs based on the framework of Principled Polysemy. Our analysis concerning the cognitive-pragmatic motivations for the meaning extensions of postverbal -kai pinpoints the significance of perspective-taking and real-world force dynamics in the conceptual structure of Chinese resultative verbs. With the aid of corpus data, we further demonstrate how pertinent textual cues help to disambiguate polysemous V-kai complex verbs and evoke metaphorical readings of the gestalt V–V constructions, hinting at the distributed and context-sensitive nature of the meaning construction of Chinese resultative verbs.

This paper investigates metaphor use in case study articles (CSAs), which share knowledge and describe counseling processes, on a Chinese university counseling centre website. Metaphors from 27 CSAs were coded under the variables textual position, target, and source. Chi-squared tests of independence reveal a moderate association between metaphor targets and metaphor position within CSAs(Cramer’s V = 0.3897), but not between sources and position(Cramer’s V = 0.0751). Crosstabulation of targets and sources reveal prominent conceptual mappings in CSAs, which are analyzed with reference to communicative and cultural factors underpinning the counselor-student relationship. Implications and future directions are discussed.

This paper discusses the new aktionsart of traversativity, here defined as the category marking the phase of ‘getting-through’ an event or a situation. Different from completives and resultatives (cf. Bybee et al. 1994), traversatives do not profile a phasal contiguity with the telos of a situation, and thus detach the actionality of the event from a subsequent resultant phase. This entails that, along a perfective cline of change, the aktionsart of traversatives triggers aspectual discontinuity or anti-resultativity (cf. Plungian & van der Auwera 2006). Drawing on this, the present work focuses on the grammaticalization of the traversative particle 过 guò in Mandarin Chinese towards experiential perfect (cf. Cao 1995, Lin 2004, Liu 2009) and interpersonal evidential (IE) usages (cf. Tantucci 2013, 2014a, 2014b). I argue that the experiential and evidential reanalyses V-过 guò are semantically and pragmatically prompted by the original traversative aktionsart of the particle 过 guò. I further discuss this phenomenon through a quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis shedding light on the correspondence between specific written genres and the synchronic employment of V-过 guò either as a phasal, an experiential or an interpersonal evidential (IE) marker. Finally, I suggest that actional discontinuity or anti-resultativity constitutes a productive semantic-pragmatic trigger of further evidential reanalyses of a construction.