In: Sixth North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics. NACCL-6. (May 1994) Edited by Jose Camacho and Lina Choueiri. 1995. Los Angeles: Graduate Students in Linguistics (GSIL), USC. Volume II. Pp. 49-74.
VERBALIZATION IN CHINESE DIALECTS AND EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES
The Ohio State University
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(This is the last of three sections.)
6. JAPANESE AND KOREAN DENOMINAL VERBS
6.1. Japanese
Concrete nouns in modern Japanese are rarely used as verb stems.
Thus, one cannot add -ru to concrete nouns to form denominal
verbs, as shown in (5):
| (5) | a. | mizu | 'water' | *mizu-ru | 'to water' |
| b. | kawa | 'skin' | *kawa-ru | 'to skin' |
To express 'to water' in Japanese, one needs to use native Japanese
verbs, such as yaru 'to give', maku 'to scatter',
to form verb phrases such as (6):
| (6) | a. | mizu o yaru | 'to give water' |
| b. | mizu o maku | 'to scatter water' |
Similarly, 'to skin' must be rendered in Japanese using native
verb expressions with kawa 'skin' as the object in the phrase:
| (7) | a. | kawa o toru | 'to take off skin' |
| b. | kawa o nagu | 'to strip off skin' | |
| c. | kawa o muku | 'to peel skin' |
Based on Sode's (1994) study, there are only a few cases of established
denominal verbs in Japanese that are formed from concrete nouns:
| (8) | a. | memo | 'memo' | memo-ru | 'to take notes' |
| b. | takusii | 'taxi' | taku-ru | 'to take a taxi' |
More innovative examples of denominal verbs in Japanese from Sode's
study involve using place names as source nouns:
| (9) | a. | Makudo(narudo) | 'McDonald (burger place)' |
| Maku-ru | 'to eat at McDonald's' | ||
| b. | Mosu | 'Moss Burger (burger place)' | |
| Mosu-ru | 'to eat at Moss Burger's' |
In addition to the above, there are other cases of verb-noun alternations,
as in (10). While the direction of derivation cannot be determined
purely on the basis of the morphological structure of the language,
native speakers tend to treat the nouns in these verb-noun pairs
as the derived forms.
| (10) | a. | tsutsu-mu | 'to wrap' |
| tsutsu-mi | 'a package' | ||
| b. | musu-bu | 'to tie up, to knot' | |
| musu-bi | 'a tie, a knot' | ||
| c. | oo-u | 'to cover' | |
| oo-i | 'a cover' |
6.2. Korean
As in Japanese, concrete nouns in modern Korean are normally not
used as verb stems. Even the addition of the -cil affix, indicating
action, is not sufficient to form the stem to create denominal
verbs as regular, indigenous verbs:
| (11) | a. | mangchi | 'hammer' | *mangchi-ta | 'to hammer' |
| *mangchi-cil-ta | 'to hammer' | ||||
| b. | khal | 'knife' | *khal-ta | 'to knife' | |
| *khal-cil-ta | 'to knife' |
Instead, to express actions involving such concrete nouns, the
hata construction is needed, together with the -cil
affix:
| (12) | a. | mangchi-cil-hata | 'to hammer' |
| b. | khal-cil-hata | 'to knife' |
Note, however, that the hata construction, like the Japanese suru
construction, was originally used to create verbal expressions
not native to the language.
As in Japanese, there are verb-noun pairs involving morphological
alternations, in which native speakers' intuition is to treat
the nouns as the derived forms, with -m as the nominalizer:
| (13) | a. | kuri-ta | 'to draw, to paint' |
| kuri-m | 'a drawing, painting' | ||
| b. | kam-ta | 'to wrap' | |
| kam-um | 'the wrapping (of s.t.)' |
We are still unclear as to the extent to which Korean permits
innovative denominal verbs, such as those in (9) in Japanese.
Pending further research, it seems that denominal verbalization
is even more restricted in Korean than in Japanese.
7. CONCLUSION
In this paper we identified a set of verbs that have corresponding
homophonous (or near-homophonous) nouns denoting concrete objects
in three Chinese dialects, namely, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwanese.
For the purpose of this study, these verbs are treated as denominal
verbs, derivable from their corresponding nouns via conversion
or zero derivation. The corpora of denominal verbs vary only slightly
among the three dialects, with Mandarin having the largest corpus.
Although they are not necessarily exhaustive, the corpora nonetheless
provide sufficient basis for our analysis. Using Clark and Clark's
set of categories of denominal verbs, the verbs in our cross-dialect
study fall under only four of those categories, namely: locatum
verbs, location verbs, goal verbs, and instrument verbs. Among
those four categories, the commonest one for all three dialects
is the instrument category. Far fewer, but next most common seems
to be verbs in the goal category, of which a large portion have
measure words as their source noun (e.g., 堆 dui
'a pile', 串 chuan 'a string (of something)',
片 pian 'a slice (of something)'). Least common
among the four categories in the Chinese corpora are the locatum
and location categories. The above ranking of the four categories,
we believe, will hold even if additional denominal verbs are identified
and included in the corpora.
It is noteworthy that the source nouns of locatum and location
verbs also assume some kind of instrumental function, as in 漆
qi 'paint' ( 'to paint', locatum verb) and 窖
jiao 'cellar' ( 'to put in the cellar', location verb).
Thus, the verb 漆 qi can be paraphrased as 'to
cover the wall with paint', and 窖 jiao as 'to
store something using the cellar'. Perhaps all three categories
(locatum, location, instrument) are prototypically instrumental
in function.
Cross-linguistically, instrument verbs also form the commonest
category in English (Clark and Clark 1979, 776). There may be
a universal hierarchy among the different categories of denominal
verbs, with the instrument category highest on the hierarchy.
If this universal hierarchy holds true, it would be consistent
with the above observation that there is a prototypical function
of instrumentation underlying the three categories of locatum,
location, and instrument verbs. Assuming the universality of the
hierarchy, if a language lacks denominal verbs in the instrument
category, it would also lack them in the other categories. This
seems to be the case in Japanese and
Korean.[10] In these two
languages, indigenous denominal verbs are very rare, with only
a few cases of exceptions in the instrument category.
Finally, it is important to note that Classical Chinese has an
abundance of denominal verbs occurring in almost all of CC's
categories. This presents a sharp contrast to the modern dialects,
and inevitably raises some intriguing questions about this difference.
For example, what precisely is the distribution of denominal verbs
in Classical Chinese with respect to CC's categories? Does
Classical Chinese exhibit the same hierarchy as observed for English
and the modern Chinese dialects in our study? What explanations
can be offered for this important contrast between Classical Chinese
and the modern dialects? Did the fading of the mechanism for creating
denominal verbs via derivation by tone change trigger the reduction
of denominal verbs in the modern language? Or, is the contrast
between Classical Chinese and the modern dialects due to some
more fundamental reasons? Questions such as these can only be
answered through an in-depth study of denominal verbs in Classical
Chinese.[11]
ENDNOTES (Numbers 10 through 11)
10. Even in the suru and hata constructions, which
have been excluded in the present study, it appears that the instrument
category is more accessible for undergoing these constructions
than other categories. [BACK]
11. See Liu (1991) for a study of denominal verbs in two Classical
Chinese texts, the Mencius and Zuozhuan. [BACK]
Clark, Eve V. and Herbert H. Clark (1979) When Nouns Surface
as Verbs, Language 55, 767-811.
Liu, Cheng-hui (1991) Nouns, Nominalization and Denominalization
in Classical Chinese: A Study Based on Mencius and Zuozhuan.
Ph.D. dissertation, The Ohio State University.
Lyons, John (1977) Semantics. Volume 2. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Marchand, Hans (1969) The Categories and Types of Present-Day
English Word-Formation. 2nd edition. Beck, Munich.
Sanders, Gerald A. (1988) Zero Derivation and the Overt Analogue
Criterion, Theoretical Morphology, 155-175. Academic
Press, NewYork.
Sode, Rumiko (1994) A Note on Denominal Verbs in Japanese,
manuscript, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
Tai, James H-Y. (1992) Category Shifts and Word-Formation
Redundancy Rules in Chinese, in H. Samuel Wang and Feng-fu
Tsao (eds.), Proceedings of the Third International Symposium
on Chinese Languages and Linguistics, National Tsing Hua University,
Taiwan, 1-19.
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