Both Chinese and English have verbs expressing self-motion momentum such as frequency,duration and intensity of the action,thus shortened as verbs used for verbal classifiers(VVCs).VVCs appear as the second verb in the Chinese con-struction of"V yi V"and nouns converted from their cognate verbs in the English construction of"light verb+a+N".Based on the analysis of constrictions,the present article makes a comparative study of VVCs between Chinese and English and ar-rives the following conclusions:1)VVCs in both languages are similar in that they are mostly monosyllabic ones without tense or voice markers and express actions of a short duration and small quantity;2)English VVCs have a stronger referential fea-ture in terms of event momentum as they are usually preceded by the indefinite article"a",and can be modified by adjectives or replaced by pronouns;and 3)VVCs are used to convey the speaker's precise expressions and realized by means of conver-sion and mimetic word formation.
verbal classifiersverbs used for verbal classifiers(VVC)comparison between Chinese and Englishlight verb+a+VVC
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
