Abstract
The main purpose of this research paper is to investigate predicates expressing the possessive meaning
“to have” in Taiwan Mandarin and Czech. In Taiwan Mandarin, the word you has the semantic
meaning of “to have” and “to exist” (Huang, 1987; Her, 1991). Mít in Czech, however, has three main
usages (Daneš, 1987; Karlík — Nekula — Rusínová, 1995; 1996; Čechová, 2000; Cvrček, 2010): it is used
as a modal, an auxiliary or a possessive verb. According to the language data collected from Taiwanese
students who study Czech, these students often use mít in Czech to express not only possession
but also existence, or they incorrectly use it as an auxiliary — in other words — their knowledge of
you in Taiwan Mandarin seems to interfere (Brown, 2007) with their usage of mít in Czech. In this
paper, firstly, relevant literature dealing with the usages of you in Taiwan Mandarin and mít in Czech
will be introduced; secondly, there will follow a discussion of the language data collected from the
NCCU foreign language learner corpus; thirdly, the grammaticalization theory (Heine, 1997) will be
applied to investigate Taiwan Mandarin you and Czech mít, which shall offer a number of explanations
regarding the observable typological diversity across these two languages. In spite of the fact
that there are similar research papers related to the expression of possessive meaning in these two
languages, this paper assumes that the cross-linguistic typological discussion shall bring more insight
into the characteristics of these two languages. Furthermore, apart from advancing the typological
discussion of these two languages, it is expected that this paper will also aid the preparation
of related textbooks and teaching materials.
Citation
ID:
161844
Ref Key:
lin2017studiea typological