The Study on the Essential Properties of Verbs of “pick up” in Chinese from a Diachronic Point of View

This paper analyzed the essential properties of the verbs of “Pick up” from a diachronic point of view. The verbs of “Pick up” was “取(qu)”, “掇(duo)”, “拾(shi)”, “撿(jian)”, “揀(phonetic loan character of 撿(jian))’. The character 撿(jian)” which was created during the Ming Dynasty, It replaced “拾(shi)” from the Qing Dynasty and became dominant word. One crucial point to note in this paper is that “揀(phonetic loan character of 撿(jian))” must not be omitted. On its own, “撿(jian)” had a lower frequency of occurrence compared to “拾 (shi)”. However, the combined occurrence of “撿(jian)” and “揀(phonetic loan character of 撿(jian))” exceeded that of “拾(shi)”.<br/> The essential properties of the verbs of “Pick up” are as follows. Their objects typically have the characteristic of having an unclear owner. Additionally, the objects are usually lightweight, inanimate items. Since “Pick up” refers to the action of bending down, lifting up a lost item left on the ground with one’s hand, and acquiring it, it is often used with prepositional phrases like ‘在地下(上)’ (on the ground) and verb-object structures like ‘V+取(得)’ (to take/get) or ‘V+起’ (to pick up). However, although “Pick up” belongs to the category of verbs of ‘acquisition’, it frequently involves objects whose ownership is unclear. As a result, it is rare to form the typical double-object construction of ‘acquisition’ verbs: ‘S (agent or acquirer)+V+O1(original owner)+O2 (property).’<br/> Finally, the reason why nearly no synonymous parallel disyllabic compound verbs were created during the Qing Dynasty can be identified. Although there were some instances of the characters “拾(shi)” and “撿/揀(jian)” during the Qing Dynasty, the frequency of the compound “撿拾” was very low. This was because “撿(jian)” was introduced relatively late, and many existing examples of the verb ‘Pick up’ relied on “揀(phonetic loan character of 撿(jian))”. Furthermore, since the actual frequency of “撿(jian)” was not very high, it did not sufficiently serve as a morpheme in forming disyllabic compound verbs.