A Study on the Verb Functions and the Collocated Objects of “Chuan” and “Dai” in Modern Chinese

• Main Authors: Lee, Chia-Fen, 李佳芬
• Other Authors: Li, Zi-Xuan
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/05206567686053650673

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 跨文化研究所語言學碩士班 === 102 === The motivation for this study comes from a soap opera dialogue. The actor and actress discuss the differences between the English verb “wear” and the Chinese verbs “chuan” and “dai.” In English, there is only one verb “wear” used to describe “wear a coat” and “wear a hat;” however, in Chinese, the verb “wear” can be translated into two Chinese verbs “chuan” and “dai,” such as “chuan waitao” and “dai maozi.” Explaining the different usages of the two Chinese verbs “chuan” and “dai” to foreign students studying Chinese is the main objective of this study. There are two dimensions of this study. The first dimension is to research the objects of the two verbs “chuan” and “dai” in “Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese” to see if there is still a connection between the features of the two verbs and their objects. For those exceptions, what are their exact features? Furthermore, the pronunciation features of the two Taiwanese verbs “chuan” and “dai” are also discussed in this study. In addition to being pronounced “tshīng,” the pronunciation of the Taiwanese verb “chuan” can change into “thah” under specific circumstances. For the Taiwanese verb “dai,” there are still another five pronunciations because of its various actions: “tshah,” “ha̍h,” “kuà,” “tàu,” “kàt.” Through the collection of data, the vague usages of the Chinese verb “chuan” or “dai” appear on specific objects. For the same object, some people use the Chinese verb “chuan” as its verb, but others think the Chinese verb “dai” would be correct. This peculiarity is the other dimension of the study, and I will use a questionnaire to survey which pronunciations are in greater use. The study on the two Chinese verbs “chuan” and “dai” and their collocated objects can show the abundance and elaboration of Chinese language, which have close relation to the broad and profound Chinese culture. Moreover, from this study, it is quite evident that language use keeps changing, and meaning can extend or contract as language evolves over time.