On the Argument Structures of the Transitive Verb ‘annoy; be annoyed; bother to do’: A Study Based on Two Comparable Corpora

PACLIC 28 !615 1 On the Argument Structures of the Transitive Verb fan ‘annoy; be annoyed; bother to do’: A study based on two comparable corpora Jiajuan Xiong Chu-Ren Huang CBS, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; CBS, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University jiajuanx@gmail.com churen.huang@polyu.edu.hk Abstract: This paper investigates the transitive uses of the verb fan „annoy; be annoyed; bother to do‟, which exhibit both similarities and disparities between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, as far as the data from Gigaword corpus, containing data from Mainland China (XIN) and Taiwan (CNA), are concerned. In terms of similarities, the causative (and agentive) use(s) of the transitive fan is/are shared by both Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. The disparity mainly lies in the mental use of fan „be annoyed‟, which is not only unattested in the corpus of Taiwan Mandarin but also reported as weird by our informants. This mental use, on the other hand, is well attested in the corpus. In order to describe as well as explain the difference in uses between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, we adopt the Theta System Theory (Reinhart 2002; Marelj 2004) to probe into the argument structures of the transitive verb fan and further pinpoint the fundamental syntactic difference between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, that is, the absence or presence of the /+c feature in the argument structure. In particular, Taiwan Mandarin requires the obligatory presence of the /+c feature in the argument structure of fan, while Beijing Mandarin does not. Keywords: transitive fan, corpus, Beijing Mandarin, Taiwan Mandarin, Theta System, /+c 1. Introduction: The intransitive fan The verb fan in Chinese can function as an intransitive verb, meaning „annoyed/ bothered‟ as well as „annoying/bothersome‟. These two uses are attested in both Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, as evidenced by the examples of (1)-(4) from the XIN and CNA, sub-corpora of Gigaword corpus.1 (1) Ta dang daxue jiaoshou de he serve_as university professor DE fuqin feidan bu guowen, father not_only NEG meddle fan‟er yi kanjian ta jiu instead whenever see he then fan. (XIN) be_annoyed „His father, as a university professor, does not meddle with his business; instead, his father seems to be annoyed whenever he sees him.‟ (2) Shoufeiyuan shengyingdi shuo, “nimen cashier stiffly said you zenme zheme fan?” (XIN) how_can so annoying „The cashier stiffly said that “How are you so annoying?”‟ (3) Zuo taitai de jide serve_as wife DE remember 1 XIN and CNA refer to Beijing-based Xin Hua News Agency and Taiwan-based Central News Agency, respectively. Copyright 2014 by Jiajuan Xiong and Chu-Ren Huang 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 615–623 PACLIC 28 !616 2 ziji shi taitai, buyao zhi oneself be wife do_not only tan qian qian qian, talk_about money money money zhangfu hui fan. (CNA) husband will be_annoyed „As a wife, one should remember your own role of being a wife and refrain from talking about money, money, money all the time. Otherwise, the husband would get annoyed.‟ (4) Ni zenme name fan, 2SG …

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