A Comparative study of ‘在+一起+V’ and ‘V+在+一起’ Structure in Modern Chinese

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the structural and cognitive differences between ‘在一起V’ and ‘V在一起’ sentence structure. Firstly, the structural difference were analyzed by the characteristics of action participant NP, spatial meaning of ‘一起’, combination with verbs (phrases), and combination with aspects. The action participant of 在一起V sentence structure had the characteristics of [+有生], and that of [±有生] showed traits of [±有生]. Whereas the spatial meaning of ‘一起’ within ‘在一起V’ exhibited specific spatial meaning, that of ‘一起’ herein ‘V在一起sentence structure displayed both specific and abstract spatial meaning. Furthermore, the two sentence structures revealed a significant difference in the combination of verbs (phrases) and location of ’了’. In particular, it was confirmed that ‘V在了一起’ appeared quite often in the ‘V在一起’ structure. This paper also looked into the cognitive differences between the two sentence structures through scanning systems and image schema. In terms of scanning systems, the sentence structure of ‘在一起V’ was interpreted as a progressive scanning system that incorporates repetitiveness, intentionality, and progressiveness, also the ‘V在一起’ sentence structure as a batch scanning system and having non-repetitiveness, non-intentionality, and non-progressiveness. In addition, the two structures showed a difference in image schema too, as seen by the ‘在一起V’ sentence structure to be explained by container schema, and ‘V在一起’ sentence structure by image schema created by the combination of path schema and container schema.