A Study on the ‘V不上’ Construction in Modern Chinese

This paper focuses on the fact that the ‘V不上’ construction in modern Chinese exhibits various semantic features depending on the verb used in utterances. It investigates which verbs are used in the position of V, what semantic characteristics the ‘V不上’ construction exhibits depending on the characteristics of the verb, and what kind of interrelationships exist among these meanings from a cognitive linguistic perspective. First, in Chapter 2, we classified the five meanings that the ‘V不上’ construction exhibits in utterances by analyzing examples extracted from the BCC corpus. Then, we extracted the verbs corresponding to each meaning and examined their frequency of occurrence. In Chapter 3, we examined the diachronic evolution of the ‘V不上’ construction. We found that the ‘V不上’ construction first appeared in Southern Song dynasty literature and had acquired all five meanings used in modern Chinese by the Yuan dynasty. Through the analysis of examples, we were able to deduce that the prototype meaning of the ‘V不上’ construction is to indicate the physical limitations of a person’s movement. Next, focusing on this prototype meaning, we analyzed the semantic extension to other meanings through the mechanisms of metonymy and metaphor based on cognitive linguistic theory. We found that metaphors displayed an expansion of the conceptual domain, while metonymy involved a narrowing of reference.