The Semantic Connotation of the Chinese Bei-Construction

僅管現今中文裡的「被字句」（the bei-construction），有越來越多的中文說話人將之用於表達中立或正面的意義，但中文的「被字句」似乎仍以表達負面、不幸的意義為主。被字句所表達的意義，主要是來自句子中的動詞（字的層次、詞的因素），或者是整個句子所形成的句意（句子的層次、語境因素）？本研究以三種不同的動詞：負面動詞、中立動詞、正面動詞，分別造於三種不同語境的「被字句」句子：負面語境、中立語境、正面語境。由中文說話人判別各句子的接受度。本研究結果顯示中文說話人在判別中文「被字句」的句子接受度時，受到整個句子的語境影響，較受到句子中動詞本身的意義影響為大，且語境的影響於統計上達顯著性。另外，中文說話人仍較容易托受表達負面、不幸意義的被字句句子。本研究的結果亦支持交互理論（Interactive Approach），即說話人在處理句子時，同時受到多種語意訊息的影響。

關鍵字

心理語言學；語意；中文；被字句；隱含意義；交互理論

並列摘要

Although Chinese speakers use the Chinese bei-construction to express a neutral or positive meaning more often that before, it seems that the main use of the bei-construction is still for expressing a negative meaning. However, it remains unclear whether the negative meaning affecting the use of bei is derived from sentence-level semantics or merely the verb’s internal connotation. In this study, we selected the 10 most positive verbs, 10 most neutral verbs and 10 most negative verbs among 140 verbs in a pretest. These three types of verbs were then put into three kinds of sentences (positive, neutral, and negative), with the sentences of each type of verb/sentence combination. These 90 sentences were presented to Chinese native speakers, who were asked to score their acceptability. A two-way ANOVA found a highly significant main effect of sentence type on acceptability, but no effect of verb type, and no sentence x verb interaction. Post hoc tests showed that the results were due to high acceptability scores fro sentences with negative connotations. Consistent with an interactive approach, the Chinese bei-construction is affected more by a higher level of semantic context than by local structural or lexical factor.

並列關鍵字

psycholinguistics ； semantics ； Chinese ； the bei-construction ； connotation ； interactive approach

參考文獻

Britt, M. A.,Perfetti, C. A.,Garrod, S.,Rayner K.(1992).Parsing in discourse: Context effects and their limits.Journal of Memory and Language.31,293-314.