Cover not available

Article published In: Chinese Language and Discourse
Vol. 16:1 (2025) ► pp.28–54

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB

Mandarin posture verbs

Cardinality, patterns of usage, and constructional preferences

ORCiD logo with link | Monash University | University of Alberta
ORCiD logo with link | Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Alberta.

Published online: 21 May 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.00048.new
Abstract
Posture verbs have attracted considerable interest within Cognitive Linguistics. This study continues this line of research by investigating usage-based patterns associated with these verbs when used in their literal posture senses. The data for the study comes from the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese and the CALLHOME Mandarin Corpus. We investigate the frequencies and distributions of the Mandarin posture verbs 坐 zuò ‘sit’, 站 zhàn ‘stand’, and 躺 tǎng ‘lie’ in four construction types: directional constructions, aspectual suffixes, serial verb constructions, and locative constructions. The analysis confirms the primacy of zuò, zhàn, and tǎng and, among other results, reveals a significant absence of locative phrases with the dynamic forms of the verbs as used with directionals.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data
  • 3.Cardinality of zuò, zhàn, and tǎng
  • 4.Constructional usage
    • 4.1Directionals
    • 4.2Aspect
    • 4.3Serial verb constructions
    • 4.4Locatives
    • 4.5Discussion of constructional usage
    • 5.Directional x Locative
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Data availability
  • Notes
  • References
References (33)
References
Abdulrahim, Dana. 2019. “go constructions in Modern Standard Arabic: A corpus study”. Constructions and Frames 111: 1–42. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chao, Yuen Ren. 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fang, Yu Q. 1992. “动词助词 ‘了’ ‘着’ ‘过’ 的语义特征及其用法比较 [The semantic features and usage comparisons of the dynamic particles le, zhe, guò]”. 汉语学习 [Chinese Studies] 11: 14–20.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2004. HCFA 3.2. Computing (hierarchical) configural frequency analyses. R Script.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. Statistics for Linguistics with R: A Practical Introduction. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hinrichs, Lars, Nicholas Smith, and Birgit Waibel. 2007. The part-of-speech-tagged ‘Brown’ corpora: A manual of information, including pointers for successful use. Department of English, University of Freiburg, Germany. [URL]
Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo. 2010. Seven events in three languages: Culture-specific conceptualizations and their pedagogical implications. In Fostering Language Teaching Efficiency through Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Sabine De Knop, Frank Boers, and Antoon De Rycker, 137–166. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jumaah, R. T., S. M. Rashid, M. Z. Abdul Jabar, and A. M. Ali. 2020. “The English Verb See in Fiction Writing: A Cognitive Semantic Analysis”. Arab World English Journal 111: 515–536. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kinn, T., K. Blensenius, and P. Andersson. 2018. “Posture, location, and activity in Mainland Scandinavian pseudocoordinations”. CogniTextes 181. [URL].
Kuteva, Tania. 1999. “On ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’ auxiliation”. Linguistics 371: 191–213. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Li, Charles N., and Sandra A. Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lǚ, Shu X. 1999. 现代汉语八百词 [800 Modern Chinese Words]. Beijing: 商务印书馆 [Shāngwù yìnshūguăn].Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McEnery, Anthony, and Zhonghua Xiao. 2004. “The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese: A corpus for monolingual and contrastive language study”. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04), 1175–1178. Lisbon, Portugal: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Newman, John. 1998. The Linguistics of Giving. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (ed.). 2002. The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing, and Lying. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (ed.) 2009. The Linguistics of Eating and Drinking. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2022. “Experiential motivation and the linguistics of sitting, standing, and lying”. WIREs Cognitive Science 13(4). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Newman, John, and Sally Rice. 2001. “English SIT, STAND, and LIE in small and large corpora”. ICAME Journal 251: 109–133.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004. “Patterns of usage for English sit, stand, and lie: A cognitively-inspired exploration in corpus linguistics”. Cognitive Linguistics 151: 351–396. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
R Core Team (2024). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. [URL]
Radden, Günter. 1996. “Motion metaphorized: The case of coming and going”. In Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods: The Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics, ed. by E. H. Casad, 423–458. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Serra Borneto, C. 1996. “Liegen and stehen in German: A study in horizontality and verticality”. In Cognitive linguistics in the Redwoods: The Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics, ed. by E. H. Casad, 459–505. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tai, James H-Y. 1985. “Temporal sequence and Chinese word order”. In Iconicity in Syntax: Proceedings of a Symposium on Iconicity in Syntax, Stanford, June 24–6, 1983, ed. by John Haiman, 49–72. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
T’ung, Ping-cheng, and D. E. Pollard. 1982. Colloquial Chinese. Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Viberg, Åke. 2010. “Basic verbs of possession: A contrastive and typological study”. CogniTextes 41. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Völkel, Svenja, and Franziska Kretzschmar. 2021. Introducing Linguistic Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
von Eye, Alexander. 1990. Introduction to Configural Frequency Analysis: The Search for Types and Anti-types in Cross-classification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
von Eye, Alexander, and Wolfgang Wiedermann. 2003. Configural Frequency Analysis: Foundations, Models, and Applications. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wang, Wei H., and Hiroyuki Akitani. 2010. “汉语 ‘站立’义词的现状和历史 [Status and history of Chinese ‘stand’ words]”. 中国语文 [Chinese Language] 41: 299–310.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wheatley, Barbara. 1996. CALLHOME Mandarin Chinese Transcripts LDC96T16. [URL]. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.
Willemsen, Jeroen. 2021. A Grammar of Reta. PhD dissertation, Aarhus University.
Xiao, Lin. 2022. “The diachronic evolution of posture verbs in Chinese”. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 58(4): 933–956. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue