Open AccessA Prototypical Model on Hakka Serial Verb Constructions
Author(s) -
YuChing Tseng
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
international journal of english linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1923-8703
pISSN - 1923-869X
DOI - 10.5539/ijel.v11n2p1
Subject(s) - verb , computer science , scope (computer science) , syntax , interdependence , modal verb , linguistics , natural language processing , component (thermodynamics) , artificial intelligence , causative , semantics (computer science) , interface (matter) , meaning (existential) , programming language , psychology , sociology , philosophy , physics , bubble , maximum bubble pressure method , parallel computing , psychotherapist , thermodynamics , social science
This research paper provides a meaning-based account to examining Hakka syntactic constructions that comprise multiple verbs in their scope. The investigation is based on an interdisciplinary approach from the interface of syntax and semantics. The paper is organized into two main parts. The first part of this paper claims that the prototypical construction of the serial verb construction is a syntactic configuration that contains two verbs in the same clause, indicating two interdependent subevents happening at close time intervals. In addition, the paper proposes that greater distance in structural and semantic interdependence between the two verbs forms a gradation deviating from the prototype. In this part, a prototype model, rather than a criterial attribute model, is adopted to define the Hakka serial verb construction (SVC). The second part of paper provides a typological study that classifies the Hakka SVCs into subtypes based on the syntactic structure and the semantic relationship of the component verbs. Syntactic tests are used to test the clausehood of the multi-verb constructions identified in this part.