중국어 수량구의 속성과 사용 제약에 대한 고찰 - 수량목적어를 중심으로

Abstract

In Chinese, quantity phrases can result in an ungrammatical sentence or lead to restricted usage in certain linguistic contexts when omitted. This study mainly focused on the quantity phrases in the form of ‘数量+名’ and examined the use and the constraints of quantity phrases based on their essential properties in Chinese, in relation to the constraints on their use in some syntaxes. In particular, this study showed the reason why a sentence with progressive and quantity phrases, such as ‘他正在喝一杯咖啡’, sounds awkward in nuance when expressed by native speakers and have low acceptability as independent sentences is due to the ambiguity of the utterance intention. However, this study also demonstrated that activation in the state of the referent itself rather than the quantitative meaning in terms of the salience of information forms cooccurrence with the progressive tense as the ‘界 (boundary)’ nature of the object is weakened based on the relative concepts of ‘有界’ and ‘无界’ in a context where the focus is not on quantity. Consequently, the issue of the acceptability and constraints of sentences like '他正在喝一杯咖啡' is closely related to contextual information and the domain of discourse meaning. The reason such expressions sound awkward in Chinese is that an accurate interpretation requires not only syntactic analysis but also an understanding of their semantic relationships.