Characteristics of Property Meaning Expression in V起来AP Construction

Abstract

This study examines the syntactic and semantic characteristics of the Modern Chinese V起来AP construction based on 247 example sentences collected from the BCC Literary Corpus.Syntactically, this construction primarily exhibits the characteristics of a middle construction, where a theme (patient) subject combines with a transitive verb; however, the study confirmed exceptional phenomena such as the occurrence of an agent subject and the combination with intransitive or stative verbs, revealing limitations in categorizing this construction uniformly as a middle construction. Therefore, this study adopts a semantic approach to the construction, with particular focus on investigating its characteristics from the perspective of property meaning expression. The semantic orientation of the adjective phrase (AP) is predominantly subject-oriented (81.78%), followed by action-oriented (12.15%), implicit experiencer-oriented (4.05%), and speaker-oriented (2.02%). The possibility of omitting V起来 is closely linked to the semantic orientation of the AP; while it is generally omissible when subject-oriented, it is mostly non-omissible when action-oriented. Regarding adjective semantic types, the VALUE category accounted for the highest proportion (41.3%), suggesting that V起来AP is a property-expressing construction specialized for value evaluation rather than the description of objective physical properties. While a variety of adjective semantic types appeared when the AP was subject-oriented, adjectives in the DIFFICULTY category appeared predominantly when the AP was action-oriented. When the AP was oriented toward an implicit experiencer or the speaker, the adjectives expressed emotional states and psychological reactions, corresponding to the HUMAN PROPENSITY semantic type. When the meaning of V起来 in V起来AP was subdivided into five types, ‘evaluation and inference through auditory/visual information’ (55.5%) accounted for the largest proportion, indicating that 看起来 and 听起来 actively function as mechanisms for evaluating and inferring properties based on sensory information. When the AP was action-oriented, V起来 was primarily used to introduce the property domain. Furthermore, 说起来 exhibited a tendency to be grammaticalized as a discourse marker indicating the speaker’s attitude toward the utterance. Based on the above analysis, this paper defines the V起来AP construction as a construction that expresses properties manifested or perceived through the verb V, and demonstrates that the specific meaning and function of V起来 are systematically differentiated according to the semantic features of the verb (V) and the semantic orientation of the AP.