Constructional meaning selection for “A+Yi (One) +x, B+Yi (one) +Y” in mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Mandarin “A+Yi(one)+X, B+Yi(one)+Y” construction has multiple constructional meanings encoded by the same syntactic form. We study the conditions for selection and/or preference of constructional meanings of this construction in this paper. Study of corpus data showed that POS and semantic roles of A/B X/Y cannot reliably predict different constructional meanings. We further show that conditions that can predict the differences in constructional meaning are the event structures of A and B’s, as well as referential relationship between “Yi(one)+X”and “Yi(one)+Y”. The context and logic relationship between A and B can also influence the constructional meaning.