Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics

Variant characters ( yìtǐzì 異體字) are alternate forms of the same character: 峰/峯 fēng 'mountain top', 群/羣 qún 'group, flock', 册/冊 cè, 裏/裡 lǐ 'inside'. While the term yìtǐzì has been – and still is – used in this sense by the general public in China, modern research prefers to deemphasize the character in favor of the word it represents in context. Accordingly, a variant is defined by the word it stands for, even if one would intuitively identify it as a different character on account of graphical properties. For this reason…

Vendler (1957, 1967) proposes that verb meanings can be classified into four basic classes, known as Vendler's or Vendlerian verb classes, depending on whether they are dynamic or not and whether they are telic or not: (1) 'states', denoting static, non-dynamic, durative situations, e.g., 'know', 'hate'; (2) 'activities', which denote dynamic, durative situations without an endpoint, e.g., 'run', 'drive'; (3) 'accomplishments', which denote dynamic, durative situations with an endpoint, e.g., 'b…

The term verb copying refers to the phenomenon in which we find two instantiations of the same verb in one sentence. It can be found when a sentence has a direct object as well as a postverbal adverbial constituent, which can range from duration/frequency expressions to directional, locative and resultative constituents (see Li and Thompson 1981, Tai 1999), as illustrated in (1) (examples adapted from Tai 1999). 1. a. 我睡覺睡了三個鐘頭。     Wǒ  shuì-jiào        shuì-le        sān      ge     zhōngtóu.  (Duration)     1sg  sleep-sleep   sleep-asp   three  clf  hour     ‘I slept for three hours.’   b…