Gei3ta1 in Taiwan Mandarin— A Particular Construction

Gei3ta1 in Taiwan Mandarin--- A Particular Construction* Chiachun Lee Nan-Jeon Institute of Technology, Department of Applied English, 737-46, No.178. Chaochin Rd. Yianshui Town, Tainan County. Taiwan chiachun@njtc.edu.tw Abstract. The present paper investigates a particular structure in Taiwan Mandarin, “(NP) + (intensifier) + gei3ta1 “give him/it”+ adjective” in terms of construction grammar. The structure is mostly observed in utterances of younger generation. Though it is not regarded as a grammatical or standard structure, it is still a register of language. The structure lays emphasis on speaker’s attitude toward an undesired, unpleasant event. In most cases, the attitude tends to be negative. The events or propositions must have existed or been completed. The adjectives compatible with this structure belong to category of higher degree. The grammatical usage illustrates semantic bleaching of gei3ta1. And the changes from giving to a grammatical particle denoting subjective belief is a kind of subjectification. Moreover, ta1 could refer to events or situation expressed by a more complicated grammatical structure, or denotes nothing as a dummy word. Though many previous studies paid attention to the newly developed structure resulted from language contact, the adequate account was not provided. It is hoped through this investigation, we will get a better understanding of this particular structure. Keywords: gei3ta1, construction meaning, speaker’s subjective attitude/belief, negative, event 1. Introduction Taiwan Mandarin is the result of language contact between Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Southern Min(TSM). There have been plenty of investigations on novel usages brought about by influence from TSM, including Kubler(1985), Tsai(2002) and Zeng(2003). However, these previous investigations mainly focus on the differences between Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. Few efforts were made to provide an adequate account on these newly emerged sentence structures. In the present paper, I am going to be concerned with one particular construction which are newly developed structure. In modern Taiwan Mandarin there are two particular structures evoking gei3ta1. One is descriptive expressions, “gei3ta1 + adjective”. The other one is resultative structure, “verb + gei3ta1 + complement”. These two sentence structures could be regarded as the result of language contact. The former structure is more novel and is confined in ordinary utterances of younger generation. Instead of their content meaning of a giving verb and the third person pronoun, gei3ta1 function like an infix for the purpose of denoting speakers’ undesired and unpleasant attitude toward on the event mentioned. The corresponding combination of giving word and the third person pronoun in TSM do not have the similar function. Thus, he present paper aims at pinning down the function and features conveyed by the construction “(NP) + (intensifier) + gei3ta1 + adjective” in TM from the perspective of construction grammar proposed by Goldberg(1995, 2006). Through careful investigation on this novel structure, it is proven once again that language has its own life. It will be influenced by surrounding languages and has its own development. The data used as examples are attracted from, mainly blogs, internet and radio programs in Taiwan. The * I would like to express my heartfelt …

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