A Corpus-based Comparatively Study on the Semantic Features and Syntactic patterns of Yòu/Hái in Mandarin Chinese

This study points out that Yòu ( ) and Hái ( ✁ ) have their own prominent semantic features and syntactic patterns compared with each other. The differences reflect in the combination with verbs. Hái ( ✁ ) has absolute superiority in collocation with V+Bu (✂)+V, which tends to express [durative]. Yòu ( ) has advantages in collocations with V+Le ( ✄ )+V and derogatory verbs. Yòu ( )+V+Le ( ✄ )+V tends to express [repetition], and Yòu ( )+derogatory verbs tends to express [repetition, derogatory]. We also find that the two words represent different semantic features when they match with grammatical aspect markers Le ( ✄ ), Zhe ( ☎ ) and Guo ( ✆ ). Different distributions have a close relation with their semantic features. This study is based on the investigation of the large-scale corpus and data statistics, applying methods of corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and semantic background model, etc. We also described and explained the language facts.