Mandarin posture verbs

Abstract

Posture verbs have attracted considerable interest within Cognitive Linguistics. This study continues this line of research by investigating usage-based patterns associated with these verbs when used in their literal posture senses. The data for the study comes from the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese and the CALLHOME Mandarin Corpus. We investigate the frequencies and distributions of the Mandarin posture verbs 坐 zuò ‘sit’, 站 zhàn ‘stand’, and 躺 tǎng ‘lie’ in four construction types: directional constructions, aspectual suffixes, serial verb constructions, and locative constructions. The analysis confirms the primacy of zuò, zhàn, and tǎng and, among other results, reveals a significant absence of locative phrases with the dynamic forms of the verbs as used with directionals.