A Chinese-English comparative study on non-conventional verb-object collocations in Chinese

Abstract

In Chinese language, "verb + non-conventional object" is a very specific and complex structure. Discussions about categories of such kinds of objects have not reached a consensus. This paper employs the "stereotypical relation" to sort out and defines seven kinds of "non-conventional object". It also attempts to explain the syntactic functions of these objects based on a Chinese-English comparative analysis. A hypothesis is eventually devised of how the non-conventional collocations come into being. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.