Functional Distinction between Zai and Zhengzai in Mandarin: Evidence from Collocations

FUNCTIONAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN ZAI (� � � �) AND ZHENGZAI (�� �� �� ��) IN MANDARIN Evidence from Collocations Lin, Tsi-chun Liu, Mei-chun National Chiao-Tung University tsichung@yahoo.com.tw mliu@mail.nctu.edu.tw Abstract Both zai and zhengzai are progressive markers in Mandarin Chinese, and by the principle of economy, there should be some differences in these two progressive markers. With the Sinica Corpus on-line tools, a significant difference is found in the collocation of adverbial adjuncts with the use of zai and zhengzai. This paper discusses three types of adverbials to distinguish these two markers: modality adverbs, time adverbs, and manner adverbs. Zhengzai cannot co-occur with [+iterative] adverbs and adverbs without a specific time reference. It mainly indicates the progression of an on-going event at a given specific time point. On the other hand, zai not only indicates the on-going process but can also signal the progression of repeated event as habitual- progressive. 1 Introduction In Mandarin Chinese, both zai and zhengzai are progressive markers which present an internal interval of a durative situation, and often have the connotations of activity and temporary imperfectivity associated with non-statives [3]. But, when talking about imperfective aspect markers in Mandarin Chinese, most studies just represent zai as a progressive marker ([2], [5], [6], [7], [11], [17], and [18]), while fewer studies indicate that there are other representations of progressive markers ([3] , [4], and [15]). Although mentioning both zai and zhengzai as progressive markers, previous studies treat them almost as interchangeable and only focus on the discussion of zai with few detailed distinction between these two forms. Given that these two markers are morphologically distinct, some questions will have to be asked: do they encode the same grammatical, semantic and pragmatic information? Do they occur in completely the same contexts or they have different contextual constraints? If the two markers are functionally identical, we may wonder why Chinese has two different and redundant progressive representations. Given the principle of economy in language, our assumption is that there must be some fine-grained distinctions between zai and zhengzai. In this paper, we adopt a corpus-based approach, since corpus data provide a wealth of grammatical associations that may help delimit the key semantic distinctions, as successfully shown in recent studies on lexical semantics (cf. [9], [13], and [14]). This paper thus aims to explore the semantic distinction between zai and zhengzai by examining their collocational patterns in discourse. 2 Methodology Most of our data come from the Sinica Corpus. Since zai has a variety of senses, we only look at the instances of zai that are compatible with zhengzai as aspectual markers. As a result, there are 2000 utterances with zai and 696 utterances with zhengzai. With the searching tools and POS tags in Sinica Corpus, we can readily retrieve the frequency counts of neighboring categories which precede or follow zai and zhengzai for further analysis. 3 Finding and Discussion The data in Sinica Corpus reveal that the top ten grammatical categories before and after zai and zhengzai do vary, …

Content truncated to 500 words