Abstract
This paper discusses and analyzes the syntactic and semantic differences between ① gege-VP ② yigege-VP and ③ yigeyige-VP from a cognitive linguistic point of view. The conclusion is as follows: The key function of ① is to highlight the universality shared by all members of a set; by scanning over the members of a set, it provides a description or an evaluation of a certain state shared by all members. In ③, by contrast, the reduplicated classifier serves as an adverb and describes the manner of an action. Its key function is to reflect the consecutiveness of the individual actions carried out by each member of a set. ② has both of these characteristics. It highlights universality when occurring with a stative predicate and reflects discreteness when occurring with a dynamic one. The three structures share a family resemblance.
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Notes
- 1.
It is pointed out in Yang Kairong (2004) that mei represents indefiniteness. For example, in (i), meigeren does not refer to a specific entity; rather, it has a generic meaning. See Givon (1984) and Liu (2002) for the definition of genericity. Of course, mei can also be used to refer to a definite set. But even in such a case, its semantic function is different from that of gege. Li and Thompson (1981) considers the function of classifier reduplication as to “signify every”, but we think it is obvious that classifier reduplication functions differently from mei, whose main function is to distribute; that is, it relates every individual in the (definite or indefinite) set it designates with the VP that follows. See Yang Kairong (2004) for more details.
(i)
Mei-ge-ren
dou
yinggai
you
ziji
de
lixiang.
每个人
都
应该
有
自己
的
理想
Every-CL-person
all
should
have
oneself
GEN
ideals.
‘Everyone should have his own ideals.’
- 2.
Generally, in this use, gege has been regarded as subjects (Lu 1986, Shi 2000, Yang 2003a, b). The grammatical features of subjects will be discussed in Section 6. Besides, it is mentioned in Yang (2003a, b) that the reason why gege cannot appear in an object position is because it serves to be an object for description or evaluation and as the relation between a described object and a describing element is similar to that between a theme and a comment. Thus, as a theme has to be positioned before a predicate, a described object must also be positioned before a predicate, but cannot appear as a grammatical object.
- 3.
See Smith (1997) and Yang Kairong (2004) for the distinction between dynamicity and stativity. Also, concerning the sentence in (7), some people think it is acceptable in, for example, the following context.
(i)
Tamen
gege
(dou)
huiqu
le,
meiyou
yi-ge-ren
liuxialai
zhaogu
wo.
他们
个个
(都)
回去
了,
没有
一个人
留下来
照顾
我
they
GEGE
(all )
go back
PFV
not-have
one-CL-person
stay
look after
me
‘They all went back. No one stayed to look after me.’
There are occasions when native speakers do not agree on whether a sentence is acceptable or not. But it is undeniable that (7) is less acceptable in comparison with the examples in (1)–(3). In other words, the more descriptive a sentence is, the more likely it is judged as acceptable; the more dynamitic a sentence is, the less likely it gets accepted. There are cases in which what appears as a verbal predicate actually represents a resultant state of an action. (ii), for example, is acceptable.
(ii)
Zai
Boliweiya
de
huaqiao
gege
cheng le
yiwanfuweng.
在
玻利维亚
的
华侨
个个
成了
亿万富翁
in
Bolivia
DE
Chinese
GEGE
become-PFV
billionaire
‘The overseas Chinese living in Bolivia have all become billionaires.’
- 4.
Corpus data also supports the idea that predicates that appear in the gege structure have to contain stative elements. Yang Kairong (2003b) collected 66 sentences of gege from a corpus with three million word tokens, and among them, 63 involve stative predicates. Yang Xuemai (2002) also collected 223 examples that include the gege structure from a database with 13 million word tokens, and there is only one which involves a predicate with high dynamicity.
- 5.
I collected 63 examples from a collection of literary work with ten million words (there are examples that are redundant), and there are 41 examples where yigeyige functions as an adverb (67 %) and only 12 examples where it functions as an attribute that modifies the object (18.7 %). Also, in the 160 first hits in Google that includes yigeyige, there are 118 examples where it functions as an adverb (73 %), 36 examples as an attribute that modifies the object (33 %), and only 7 as an attribute that modifies the subject (4 %). A similar result is also reported in Yang Defeng (2004), whose data include 630 examples with yigeyige and yigege and 326 of them are adverbial ones (51.7 %). The ten million word corpus data used for this paper is collected by researchers in the Komaba campus of the University of Tokyo from the literary works of the following modern writers: 王蒙 Wang Meng, 张贤亮, Zhang Xianliang 陈建功 Chen Jiangong, 余华 Yu Hua, 王朔 Wang Shuo, etc.
- 6.
In this use, it can also be interpreted as multiple occurrences or repetition of actions. See Yang Defeng (2004).
- 7.
However, depending on the verb which yigeyige occurs with, there are also cases where zenme cannot be used as the question word. In some other cases, it is difficult for yigeyige to appear in the answer to a question with zenme. For example, in answering the question in (i), (ii) is less appropriate than (iii). That is, in the context where the actions involved are not associated with the (consecutive) manner of actions, it is difficult for yigeyige to be used.
(i)
Tamen
shi
zenme
shuo
de?
他们
是
怎么
说
的?
They
copula
how
say
DE
‘How did they say it?’
(ii)
?Tamen
shi
yigeyige
shuo
de.
?他们
是
一个一个
说
的。
They
copula
yigeyige
say
DE
‘They said it one by one.’
(iii)
Tamen
shi
zheme
shuo
de
他们
是
这么
说
的。
They
copula
this way
say
DE
‘They said it this way.’
- 8.
I also collected 100 examples from a literary corpus with ten million tokens. The statistics show that there are 41 examples where it functions as a subject, 27 examples as an adverb, and 32 as an attribute of the object. Also, from the 120 examples we collected from Google, there are 38 examples where it serves as an adverb, 64 examples where it serves as an attribute of the object, and 18 where it serves as a subject. Furthermore, Yang Defeng (2004) reports that out of the 630 examples of yigeyige and yigege, there are 36 examples where classifier reduplication serves as a subject, with 33 of them being examples of yigege.
- 9.
This phenomenon is also observable in the morphology of Chinese. For example, gai-shan ‘change-good’ is a word in contrast with gai-hao ‘change-good’. In the former, no element is allowed to intervene between gai and shan, and it is thus considered a word. Contrastively, in the latter, elements such as bu ‘not’ can be inserted between gai and hao, and hence it is not considered a word, but a verb-complement structure.
- 10.
In Langacker(1987), sequential scanning is referred to as the cognitive process associated with verbs. In this paper, we used the term to refer to scanning on different members of a set.
- 11.
- 12.
See Lu (1986) for the diagnoses of universal subjects.
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Acknowledgment
This paper is a modified version of a Japanese paper published in “The Bulletin of the Chinese language Society of Japan” 2006, 253. I appreciate the editors and my student Pamela Hsiaowen Peng for their cooperation.
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Yang, K. (2015). On the Semantic Functions of Three Different Types of Classifier Reduplication in Mandarin Chinese. In: Xu, D., Fu, J. (eds) Space and Quantification in Languages of China. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10040-1_11
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