| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 中國語文學系所 === 106 === The study mainly discusses the meaning and function of Taiwanese Mandarin V-diao from a cognitive linguistic perspective. When diao (originally meaning “to drop”) is used as a post-verbal particle, its meaning is extended beyond the original meaning via mechanisms like metaphor and metonymy. We argue that the meanings of V-diao constructions fall into three categories: “separation”,“disappearance”, and “realization of states”. For example, tuo diao (“to take off”) can enter the category of “separation”, and zou diao (“to walk away”) can enter the category of “disappear-ance”, whereas guan diao (“to turn off”) can enter the category of “realization of states”.
However, we believe that the three categories are not mutually exclusive to each other, since there are some other verbs that can be classified as belonging to two categories: bing diao (“to merge”), za diao (“to smash”), and ronghua diao (“to become melted”). Therefore, we think that the meaning of diao has several relevant and occasional overlapping possibilities, and we adopt Prototype Theory in cognitive linguistics to explain the situation of semantic classification.
There are two types of language data used in this research: the Chinese Gigaword corpus (with news from Central News Agency) and the PTT Corpus (with the colloquial data from daily life). According to the increase of frequency in using V-diao, we find that there are some emerging usages of V-diao showing up, such as tanhua diao (“to carbonize”), bianyuan diao (“to be isolated/marginalized”), jingshen diao (“to be ignored”). As long as the verbal meaning is compatible with the semantics of diao, it can enter the V-diao construction. Thus, we believe diao is in the process of grammaticalization.
In some sentence patterns, V-diao constructions take atypical objects to express the semantics of the sentence in the way of metonymy. It shows the syntactic particularity of V-diao. We think the teaching of V-diao should be divided into two levels: formal written materials and informal written materials. In the end, we examine the distribution of V-diao in textbooks for teaching Chinese as a second language, and based on the re-sults, we provide suitable pedagogical suggestions and the appropriate order of teaching.
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