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This study re-examines Mandarin Placement verbs from a lexical-constructional perspective and redefines the class with semantic-to-syntactic properties pertaining to lexicalization patterns in Mandarin. It aims to show that Placement verbs lexicalize a cognitively salient causal chain that extends from an agentive motion to locational change and to resultant spatial configuration. The event chain serves as the conceptual basis for linking motion-triggered events and states that are syntactically distinct in profiling the three contingent stages: caused to move → caused to be → spatially grounded. Although English Placement verbs (put, hang, etc.) are typically taken to be exemplars of the caused-motion construction, this study shows that Placement verbs may be distinguished syntactically and semantically from pure Caused-Motion verbs and posture-based Spatial Configuration verbs. While the three classes of verbs may be viewed as demonstrating respectively the individuated stages of the proposed event chain, Placement verbs are the only class that encompasses all three event types in their meanings and are associated with a wide range of semantically compatible constructions. The three stages are discussed with graphical representations and collocational distinctions. Further sub-classifications of the Mandarin Placement verbs are provided with different semantic profiles for each subclass. Crucial to the analysis is the fact that location-profiled uses of Placement verbs outnumber path-profiled uses in Mandarin, indicating a categorical shift from motional to locational predication. By teasing out the language-specific and class-specific lexicalization patterns that are collo-constructionally definable, the study demonstrates the usefulness of a lexical-constructional approach in fine-tuning verbal semantic distinctions for cross-linguistic and cross-categorial comparisons.

This article presents a corpus-based distributional analysis of the usage patterns of a cluster of words and compounds containing the morpheme qià (恰) ‘just, exactly’, by the aid of an extended concordancer to retrieve representative collocations from their adjacent contexts in Chinese Gigaword. Upon a survey of the historical evolution of the qià cluster with exemplar data and an overview of existing proposals to account for their usages in terms of expectational match, our distributional analysis is conducted to identify the salient collocational or contextual features that lead to a number of interesting findings. Substantial evidences are provided for clarifying the non-word status of qià rú (恰如) and qià sì (恰似) and their similarities, the exchangeability of qiàhǎo (恰好) and qiàqiǎo (恰巧), distinct collocational preferences of the adverbs qià (恰), qiàqià (恰恰) and the others with different subsets of verbs, the prosodic requirement of an even number of syllables for a qià-adverb and its main verb, and the contrastive popularity of qiàqià (恰恰) vs qiàdàng (恰当) to reveal different usage tendencies between speakers in Taiwan and the Mainland. All these novel findings and insights about the subtle (dis)similarities in the usage and meanings of the qià (恰) cluster suggest that distributional analysis of contextual collocations using large-scale language data remains a powerful tool that can complement other analytical approaches for the advancement of lexical semantic research.

This paper explores the various functions of diào in Mandarin Chinese as it changes from a verb to a phase marker. As a phase marker, diào provides a natural endpoint to a co-occurring event and indicates completion, which is a distinct function from the perfect marker le. In this shift, the meaning of diào also expands, including ‘falling down’, ‘throwing down’, ‘disappearing’, ‘removal’, ‘completion’ and ‘change of state’. The multifunctionality of diào is the result of grammaticalization along with semantic change and extension. Cognitive mechanisms such as metonymic and metaphoric extensions, pragmatic inferencing, analogy on Verb-Complement structures, and semantic generalization all contribute to the grammaticalization of diào, with further influence from contact with southern Chinese dialects. This paper further argues that the grammaticalization and semantic extension of diào is in accordance with the development of aspectual markers cross-linguistically, reflecting the commonality in human cognition.

Using Huawei annual reports as data sources, this study examines rhetorical strategies in business discourse for the construction of corporate identity. A socio-pragmatic framework is proposed for analysing such strategies, incorporating a textual analysis of rhetorical strategies, a discourse analysis of pragmatic functions and discursive tendencies, and a social analysis of the construction of corporate identity. The research concludes that, among other strategies, allusion and reference demonstrate the discursive tendency of commodification, while parody and metaphor highlight the discursive tendency of democratisation. In terms of the constructive functions, allusion, reference, parody, and metaphor are used to construct the commerciality, legitimacy, approachability, and entrepreneurship of an enterprise, respectively. This study highlights the importance of rhetorical strategies for the construction of corporate identity and the necessity for annual report writers to employ rhetorical strategies for better corporate communication.

The study aims to explore the processing pattern of Mandarin Chinese sentences with complement coercion. Complement coercion is a known linguistic phenomenon in which some verbs, semantically requiring an event-denoting complement, are combined with an entity-denoting complement, as in Mary began the book. The combination (i.e., event-selecting verb + entity-denoting noun) has been reported to involve type mismatch, and thus elicits processing difficulty. While the phenomenon has been extensively studied in Indo-European languages, such as English and German, it is debatable if the phenomenon exists in a typologically distinct language from English (e.g., in structural complexity of words), such as Mandarin. To provide empirical evidence, the study conducted a self-paced reading experiment to compare the processing patterns of coercion sentences and non-coercion controls in Mandarin. The results showed longer reading times for the coercion sentences than the non-coercion counterparts, which supported previous findings about the processing difficulty of complement coercion.

The study explores the humor-body association from the perspective of embodied cognition. According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, abstract concepts tend to be understood with concrete experiences through embodied mappings. Therefore, the current study attempts to investigate how humor, an understudied abstract concept, is perceived in the Chinese context by means of textual analysis and a behavioral experiment. Firstly, 6,500 entries of the corpus data related to laughter and humor in Chinese were used for the textual analysis. Extensive uses of embodied humor metaphors were found, which provided important linguistic evidence for the interaction between laughter, humor, and body. Secondly, a behavioral study was conducted based on some frequently-used embodied metaphorical expressions of humor (e.g., pěngfù dàxiào 捧腹大笑, meaning ‘to hold one’s sides laughing’) identified in the corpus. Specifically, the participants were instructed to either do embodied metaphor or non-metaphor actions as bodily primes (i.e., ‘holding one’s belly while bending forward and backward repeatedly’ vs. ‘turning one’s upper body from side to side with both hands on the back’) or perform no actions before completing the subsequent joke rating task and the mood rating task. Results showed that the participants who were primed with the embodied metaphor actions rated the jokes higher than those in the control groups who were primed with non-metaphor actions or had no primes. Also, there was no significant difference in the mood ratings across the groups. These findings suggest that embodied humor metaphors indeed affect humor experience and shape how humor is conceptualized. The current study supports not only the embodied view of humor understanding but also the conceptual metaphor account of abstract reasoning, which sheds new light on the theoretical development of the embodiment of abstract concepts.

According to Goldberg (1995), placement verbs (such as put) are instantiated in the Caused-Motion Construction. Rohde (2001), however, argued that placement verbs in fact occur in a different construction, which she names the Caused-Position Construction, whose semantic value is not ‘cause to move’ but rather ‘cause to be positioned’. The present paper redefines and justifies the postulation of Caused-Position Construction. The Caused-Position Construction is compatible with not only placement verbs but also a variety of other verbs, such as verbs of creation (write or build) or certain stative verbs (want or need), many of which also occur in the Locative Inversion construction. Further, a similar distinction between Caused-Motion and Caused-Position can be attested in Mandarin as well, which suggests that the distinction between two patterns of spatial causation may not be idiosyncratically confined to the English language but motivated by the general patterns of human cognition.

This behavioural profiling (BP) study examines the use of the near-synonyms rang (讓), shi (使) and ling (令), three ways to express cause-effect relationships in Chinese. Instead of using an out-of-the-box BP design, we present a modified approach to profiling that includes a range of frame semantic features that aim to capture variation of slot fillers of this construction. The study investigates the intricate semantic variation of rang, shi and ling through a comprehensive analysis of 38 contextual features (ID tags) that characterize the collocational, lexical semantic and frame semantic environment of the near-synonyms. Our dataset consists of around 100.000 data points based on the annotation of 1002 sentences of Mandarin Chinese of three varieties. The BPs of each near-synonym are compared using multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis. The results show that rang, shi and ling are each characterized by a combination of distinctive features and how different feature types contribute to setting the near-synonyms apart based on their usage patterns. Methodologically, this study illustrates how behavioural profiling can be modified to include frame semantic features in accordance with the method’s emphasis on producing empirically verifiable results and how these features can aid a comparative analysis of near-synonyms.

This paper explores the pragmatics of emojis co-occurring with or embedded in text on Chinese social media with this central research question: what are the patterns and the communicative functions manifested by emojis in co-occurrence with Chinese text? Building on the metafunctional approach of multimodal analysis, popular online posts from Sina Weibo which contain both emoji(s) and text have been collected and analyzed to discover the representational, interactive, and compositional features manifested by emojis co-occurring with text. We have found that these emojis on Weibo appear most frequently at the end of the posts and reflect some unique Chinese cultural and linguistic features. Based on recurring pragmatic and functional patterns of text-emoji co-occurrences, it is proposed that emojis are used to perform speech acts, highlight subjective interpretations, and enhance informality, while substituting, reinforcing, and complementing the meanings conveyed by verbal language.

The present study is an attempt at a comprehensive presentation of various functions in the reference system of Mandarin Chinese. The study demonstrates that the reference system of Mandarin consis...

This study examines whether Chinese complement coercion sentences with aspectual verbs will elicit processing difficulty during real-time comprehension. Complement coercion is a linguistic phenomenon in which certain verbs (e.g., start, enjoy), requiring an event-denoting complement, are combined with an entity-denoting complement (e.g., book), as in The author started a book. Previous studies have reported that the entity-denoting complement elicited processing difficulty following verbs that require event argument compared with verbs that do not (e.g., The author wrote a book). While the processing of complement coercion has been extensively studied in Indo-European languages such as English and German, it is relatively under-researched in Sino-Tibetan languages such as Mandarin Chinese. Given the fact that there are many linguistic elements behaving distinctly in the different language families, for instance, verbs with respect to their semantic properties and syntactic representations of the complement, it is meaningful to investigate whether or not the existing linguistic differences have any effect on the processing of complement coercion in Mandarin. With this research goal, we recorded self-paced reading time of 61 native Mandarin speakers to investigate the processing of the entity-denoting complement in sentences with three different verb types (aspectual verbs which require an event-denoting complement, preferred verbs which denote a preferred interpretation of the aspectual expressions, and non-preferred verbs which denote a non-preferred but plausible interpretation of the aspectual expressions), as exemplified in 顾客开始/填写/查看这份问卷 gù-kè kāi-shǐ/tián-xiě/chá-kàn zhè-fèn wèn-juàn “The customer started/filled in/checked the questionnaire.” It was found that the entity noun complement (e.g., 这份问卷 zhè-fèn wèn-juàn “the questionnaire”) elicited significantly longer reading times in coercion sentences than non-coercion counterparts. The results are compatible with the previous findings in English that complement coercion sentences impose processing cost during real-time comprehension. The study contributes empirical evidence to coercion studies cross-linguistically.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to find how the changing relationship between labour and political parties influenced the growth of reasonably independent labour unions in Taiwan.Design/methodology/approachThe authors have drawn on data collected through in-depth interviews of union officials, labour activists and members of legislature from two major political parties in Taiwan.FindingsThe authors found that the breach between labour and political parties was affected by the eventualities contemplated in democratisation. Though the DPP (Minchin-tang/Democratic Progressive Party) provided the initial “shot in arm”, autonomous unions have not necessarily grown underneath DPP’s dominion. Political liberalisation of Taiwan’s industrial relations systems has gained more momentum when the DPP was in opposition than in power. Anti-incumbency pushed independent unions to sway the opposition’s backing when Kuomintang (KMT/the Chinese Nationalists) was in power and not to that extent when the KMT stepped down. The autonomous labour movement in Taiwan was initially influenced by the changing relationship between labour and ruling parties. However, the movement was subsequently shaped by the ethnic and political characteristics based on the historical divide between the mainlanders and Taiwanese and Taiwan’s changing economic landscape.Research limitations/implicationsSpecific limitations include the subjectivity of the inference and lack of generalisability of the findings that are based on interviews with two out of three players of industrial relations system.Practical implicationsBecause of globalisation and global financial crisis that brought together a new generation of workforce who hold individualistic values, have lesser faith in collectivism and perform new forms of work where unionisation is no more relevant, the autonomous labour movement in Taiwan was hugely impacted.Originality/valueGrowth of independent unions is not being shaped by democratisation alone. If we refocus the debate about democracy’s implied relationship with the rhetoric of national identity, one can see the crucial role played by the changing economic landscape and ethnic divisions ingrained in political origins.