Difference between revisions of "SVC in Chinese"

Latest revision as of 16:43, 7 April 2011

In the Chinese recording of Simon’s cat, I found three types of SVC:

Type 1 V1+V2 (dao)

Type 2 V1+V2(+V3)

In type 1 the second verb is dao “arrive” indicating the direction of the action expressed by the first verb fei “fly”, tiao “jump”, pu “jump”, cang “hide”, fang “put” or tun “swallow”, and some linguists called the second verb as co-verb, which means the verb has the function of the preposition. But I think the second verb dao can be considered as V2 which shares the same subject with V1. And type 2 is similar to type I because the following two verbs also have the function of preposition. The difference is that the second verb of the serial verbs usually indicates the path of the first verb, and the third verb indicates the direction. For instance, in examples 2, 16 and 23, V1 is the main action of the whole event, V2 indicates the path of the main action and V3 expresses the final direction of V1. By the way, the three verbs also share the same subject. If the clause pu shang qu is divided into two parts: pu shang “jump on” and shang qu “up go”, the shang in the first part is a locative preposition “on”, while the shang in the second part is directional preposition “up”. We can also assume that the clause shang qu functions as a compound verb indicating the direction of the first verb pu. In this case, the example 4 contains only two serial verbs.

Type 3 Resultive SVC (V1+V2)

In type 3, there are two adjacent predicates in a single clause, in which the first predicate is the reason of the second one, and the second one is the result of the first one. They indicate two different events, namely, the first one expresses the action “hit”, and the second one describes the result “fell down”. Yet they have different subjects.