There is still much room for research on the correlation between Chinese causative constructions and animacy. Based on the corpus, this paper makes a statistic analysis of the subject's animacy in the Chinese periphrastic causative, and probes into the similarities and differences of the subject's animacy in the causative sentence guided by "shi/ling/rang/jiao/ba". Our analyses show that: (1) in terms of usage frequency, the sequence of Chinese periphrastic causatives in the literature corpora from high to low mainly presents the following tendency:"ba" sentence>"shi" sentence>"rang" sentence>"ling" sentence>"jiao" sentence; (2) as far as the distribution of the subject's animacy is concerned, "ba" sentence and "rang" and "jiao" sentences that indicate the meaning of command, permission, and freedom have the strongest tendency to use human causers, while "shi/ling/rang/jiao" sentences that indicate causative meaning tend to use event causer as the subject; (3) with regard to the semantic type of the subject, the causers of the Chinese periphrastic constructions are relatively complex and have diverse characteristics; (4) as for the priority sequence of subject's animacy, there are significant differences in the periphrastic constructions except for the "shi" and "rang" sentences.
维普
万方数据