earticle

영어

This study focuses on a special type of verbs, “generalized verbs”, in Chinese dialects, whose scope of use are very broad and vague. In the phenomenon of polysemy in English verbs, the close connection between multiple meanings is a process of extending from the central meaning of one word to other meanings. However, the meaning of a generalized verb is uncertain, and can only be affirmed in a specific context. Taking “zheng”(整) in Chinese Northeast Dialect as an example, this study conducted a corpus-based network analysis to explore the semantic development process of “zheng” and provided a reasonable explanation for its expansion rules. Generally, the meanings of the generalized verb “zheng” are to be classified into five categories, i.e., (1) to refer to an unspecified action, (2) to produce and yield results, (3) to use one’s body parts to make action, (4) to use tools and make action, (5) to refer to some fixed collocations and idioms.