Download Full PDF

刘念
俄克拉荷马大学，美国
 

摘要
本研究基于 Lakoff & Johnson (1980) 关于本体隐喻的观点，在 Link (2013) 观察到的英语中名词偏好与汉语中动词偏好的基础上，选取两种语言中的代表性报纸建立语料库进行比较研究，结果证实了两种语言对于名词与动词的偏好显著不同：汉语文本中的名词相对于动词的比例显著低于英语中的比例，显示了与英语名词偏好相迥异的汉语动词偏好。此外，本研究进一步考察了以英语为母语的汉语学习者的汉语写作，探究其汉语写作是否因受到母语英语的影响而显示出不同于汉语母语者动词偏好的语言使用。结果表明，这些汉语学习者在汉语写作中使用动词的比例明显低于汉语母语者，表现出较低的动词偏好。本研究通过语料库研究和统计分析，用实证的方法验证了汉语与英语中动词与名词偏好不同的理论假设，同时也揭示出对外汉语教学中也会遇到的此类词性偏好问题，并对如何改进教学提出了具体的建议。

关键词
动词偏好，名词偏好，本体隐喻，语料库，纽约时报，人民日报

 

Verb Bias in Chinese and its Effect on L2 Chinese Learners’ Writing
 

Nian Liu
University of Oklahoma, USA
 

Abstract
Previous studies (e.g., Link, 2013) suggest that the Chinese language has a higher verb-to-noun ratio than English. This phenomenon might result from the extensive use of ontological metaphor in English (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) where abstract concepts are identified and referred to as entities or substances. The purpose of the current research is twofold. It first explores whether Chinese shows verb bias while English presents noun bias by examining language use in representative newspapers. Two corpora were constructed based on news articles on COVID-19 from the US newspaper New York Times and the Chinese newspaper People’s Daily. Results confirm a higher verb-to-noun ratio in Chinese news sources than in English. Additionally, this project explores whether L1 English learners of L2 Chinese show verb bias or noun bias in their L2 Chinese writing. A learner corpus was compiled from essays written by L2 Chinese learners. Results reveal a lower verb-to-noun ratio in L2 learners’ writing than in the Chinese corpus based on People’s Daily. Linguistic and pedagogical implications are discussed by demonstrating how explicit instruction on verb bias versus noun bias can help enhance L2 learners’ awareness of the cross-linguistic difference and improve their Chinese writing.
 

Keywords
Verb bias, noun bias, ontological metaphor, corpus linguistics, L2 writing