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A study of subjectivity about ‘possessor-subject possessee-object’ construction: based on ‘王冕死了父亲’

  • 인문논총
  • 2024, 64(), pp.235-256
  • DOI : 10.33638/JHS.64.10
  • Publisher : Institute for Human studies, Kyungnam University
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : April 25, 2024
  • Accepted : June 14, 2024
  • Published : June 30, 2024

NAM RYANG WOO 1

1경남대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the ‘possessor-subject possessee-object’ construction, in which an intransitive verb is combined with a subject and an object, such as ‘王冕死了父亲’, and the subject and object are semantically in an possessor-possessee relationship, and examines the mechanisms of this construction from a cognitive grammar perspective. Language users structure and interpret the same situation or scene in different ways. So we can say ‘王冕的父亲死了’ or ‘王冕死了父亲’ for the situation that ‘王冕’'s father died. This is the result of language users structuring and interpreting the same situation differently. We believe that the former is an objective statement, while the latter reflects the subjectivity of the language user. This paper considers that the former is an objective statement, while the latter reflects the subjectivity of the language user. Chinese tends to express subjectivity through untypical syntactic structure. The ‘possessor-subject possessee-object’ construction ‘王冕死了父亲’ is an untypical syntactic structure in which the intransitive verb ‘死’ has an SVO structure that requires two arguments. In this sentence, ‘死’ violates the argument structure, and this paper believes that this is because the speaker intentionally broke the argument structure, thereby projecting the speaker’s subjectivity into the interpretation of the situation. Therefore, unlike ‘王冕的父亲死了’, in ‘王冕死了父亲’, the speaker empathizes with ‘王冕’ and reflects attitudes such as ‘I feel sorry that his father died at his young age’.

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