An Investigation On The Combination Forms Of Modern Chinese And English Reciprocal Verbs Based On The Language Cropus

Verbs, as the center of a sentence, can be found both in Chinese and Englishplaying its decisive role in syntactic structures and communicative competence.Reciprocal Verbs in Chinese, firstly introduced by Dexi Zhu in his Grammar TeachingMaterial published in1982when he discussed words both belonging to conjunctionand preposition, are regarded as a special category of verbs in modern Chinese. So far,the method of how to collect Reciprocal Verbs has not been developed into asubordinate definition system which is extensive, clear, exclusive and completed.Additionally, traditional studies have aimed primarily at description from certainaspect and perspective, but there is few study based on substantial examples todescribe comprehensively about anteroposterior match of Reciprocal Verbs and itssyntactic features. In modern English, there exists Reciprocal Verbs as well. Early in1924, Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist, discussed this grammatical phenomenonusing specifically one chapter in his The Philosophy of Grammar. Chinese andEnglish are the different language family and there are enormous differences in eachverbs structure, combination forms of anteroposterior match and connected semanticobjects, and consequently the stark divergence can be obviously found in terms ofReciprocal Verbs. Nevertheless, studies of combination forms relating to both Chineseand English Reciprocal Verbs have rarely been done.Proofed by a large amount of instances and based on the language materialsselected from Center for Chinese Linguistic PKU and British National Corpus, thepaper investigates the differences in the combination forms of the sentence structuresrelated to Chinese and English Reciprocal Verbs. The definition of the category verbsis firstly conducted in terms of the semantics and syntax when dealing with theChinese Reciprocal Verbs. Additionally, based on the parsing of the languagematerials from the corpus and combining with the theories of Semanteme, Valenceand Movement, the paper makes a general description of combination forms ofChinese Reciprocal Verbs and sentence elements related to them according to semantics and syntax respectively, and discusses subordinated definition ofReciprocal Verbs’ interior system. When it comes to the Reciprocal Verbs in modernEnglish, twenty-six Reciprocal Verbs corresponding to Chinese ones have beenselected. Through the specific analysis of a large amount of instances and summingup the combination mode of their anteroposterior sentence elements, the paper brieflydiscusses and analyzes the conditions and reasons that contribute to the differentcharacteristics between Chinese Reciprocal Verbs and English ones.