Syntactic And Semantic Analysis Of Ba Construction And The Processing Of Displacement Feature

Ba construction,as an important syntactic structure,is used on a frequent basis in Mandarin Chinese.Following the trend of cognitive linguistics,explaining Ba construction from Displacement Account has received growing attention.According to the Displacement Account,the core semantic meaning of Ba construction is a change in the position of the object caused by an action introduced by the verbal phrase(Zhang,2001).In this study,we analyzed the syntactic structure and semantics of Ba construction in a Modern Chinese corpus,and conducted a word recognition experiment and a self-paced reading experiment to investigate displacement features of Ba construction in language processing.In the corpus-based study,we combined qualitative and quantitative methods and analyzed the statistical distributions of Ba sentences expressing different semantic types.The focus is on the syntactic structures and semantic meanings of the Ba construction and the interaction between them.The results showed the dominant semantic meaning of Ba construction was displacement,while semantic meanings of Ba construction could vary across different syntactic structures.Ba sentences with a displacement schema appear to be most frequently used in combination with the structure of VP = V + prepositional phrases.Experiment 1 focused on the processing of Ba construction with a displacement meaning.By using a word recognition paradigm,we explored how native Chinese speakers and second language speakers process Ba construction.The results showed that the recognition time of the probe word,which denoted the potential starting point of displacement,did not differ across different sentence types(Ba sentences / sentences without Ba).For both native speakers and advanced level second language speakers of Chinese,the processing was not affected by sentence structure,and neither was it influenced by the degree of semantic association between the probe word and the displaced object.In Experiment 2,a self-paced reading paradigm was used to examine the reading time of the subjects.It was found that after reading a Ba construction sentence,readers took less time to process the follow-up key word(corresponding to the probe word in experiment 1),compared to the counterpart sentence without Ba.The results indicated that after reading Ba construction expressing displacement,readers established a strong displacement representation containing the starting point of displacement in the situation model,which makes it easier to process the key word which denoted the starting point of displacement.The findings support the Displacement Account of Ba construction.