A Corpus-based Study Of Time Words

Time words include time nouns and time adverbs,both of them express time,however they are different in syntactic function.“Shi qian”,“shi xian” and “shi hou” are frequently used in modern Chinese.However,they have not been thoroughly researched.With the aid of “Modern Chinese Corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU”,we extracted sentences that involved “shi qian”,“shi xian” and “shi hou”,trying to find similarities and differences from the words on the left and right sides.After analyzing and contrasting “shi qian”,“shi xian” and “shi hou”,we found that these words are mainly used as adverbials,occasionally serve as attributive.They could be located at the beginning or center of the sentence.Therefore,“shi qian”,“shi xian” and “shi hou” are all time nouns.“Shi qian”,“shi xian” and “shi hou” are mainly followed with actionoriented verbs and then psycho-cognitive verbs.Besides that,“shi qian”,“shi xian” and “shi hou” could appear alone,which means without any collocation words.They usually appear at the beginning of the sentence,and will generally follow with punctuation symbols.These words can be combined with certain nouns to form a noun phrase,but only for a very small portion.“Shi qian”,“shi xian” and “shi hou” are mainly appeared after verbs,nouns or pronouns,prepositions,and can be used alone.However,although “shi qian”,“shi xian” and “shi hou” appear after a verb,they are not used as a complement,but an adverbials.