The Meanings of QI in Mandarin Chinese in Factive Motion Events

Main Article Content

Sirikamol Sirisumpan
Chatchawadee Saralamba

Abstract

QI in Mandarin Chinese is polysemous. Its meanings deal with human bodily experiences of motion, and motions of objects, as well as human conceptions of time and quantity. This research aims to analyze the meanings of QI in factive motion events. The method was to obtain 1,945 sentences from three corpora in which the word QI is used: the Mandarin Chinese Corpus of the Center for Chinese Linguistics, Peking University; the Mandarin Chinese Corpus of the Beijing Language and Culture University; and the Chinese Corpus of the Chinese Ministry of Education. The findings show five meanings of QI in factive motion events. The meanings are 1) self-agentive changing posture MOVE with the PATH, 2) self-agentive/agentive transitional MOVE with the PATH, 3) the PATH of change of posture, 4) the PATH of transitional move, and 5) the PATH of bodily internal move. All of them include the meaning of PATH as a straight vertical line with departure vector where FIGURE is above GROUND with anchorage attention.

Article Details

How to Cite
Sirisumpan, S. ., & Saralamba, C. . (2021). The Meanings of QI in Mandarin Chinese in Factive Motion Events. Language and Linguistics, 39(2), 1–30. Retrieved from https://so04.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/joling/article/view/246365
Section
Research Article

References

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