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Abstract
This study explores the semantic and the syntactic status of ba in the Chinese ba-construction from a systemic functional perspective. At the level of meaning, ba functions as the Process element in the transitivity structure of the overall construction, and delivers an influential meaning. This means that the ba-construction involves a dominant and a dependent process. The dominant process is a configuration of a Participant Role (PR, hereafter), the influential Process element and another PR, and the influential Process element is expressed in the word ba. At the level of form, ba is the Predicator element in the syntactic structure of the overall construction. It indicates that the ba-construction involves a ranking and an embedded clause at the primary and the secondary level, respectively. The ranking clause is composed of the Subject, Predicator and Complement elements, and the Predicator element is expounded by the word ba.
Acknowledgements
The author is greatly indebted to Prof. Wendy Bowcher at Sun Yat-sen University for her very insightful comments on the paper and for her very careful proofreading of the whole paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Examples (1) and (2) are taken from Fan (Citation2001, 313), and (3) and (4) from Fan (Citation2001, 316). Other examples in this study without special notation are from the Chinese Corpus constructed by the Center for Chinese Linguistics, Peking University, which is abbreviated as CCL.
2 In this study, measure words in Chinese such as ge in (2) and (4) find no translation, for there are no equivalents in English. Therefore, all such measure words in Chinese pinyin are also presented in the line of translation. Meanwhile, it should be noted that ba is also retained in the line of the word-for-word translation because of its complication in terms of meaning. As regards le, the specification would be found in Notes 8 and 11 in the subsequent text.
3 Note that the first letters of technical terms concerning elements in the semantic and syntactic structures of the clause in CG are capitalized.
4 Many types of process can express various meteorological meanings, but as the concept of meteorological process just refers to the clauses in which it is the process (or together with its extension, rather than with any participant) that represents the meteorological meanings, influential meteorological processes can be found in English while none of such processes can be found in Chinese. This is also due to the fact that the influential process requires a participant that is to be influenced in its embedded process – whether this participant refers to a certain entity or nothing in the world, and that there is an empty Subject “it” representing an unidentified participant in English whereas there is not such an empty Subject in Chinese. Therefore, we cannot provide an example in the position of (19b).
5 As explained in He et al. (Citation2017b), the term “communicative process” is more accurate than “verbal process” to refer to our experience of transferring information through language. “Verbal” usually implies that the participant executing the “verbal” action is a conscious being; however, there are many linguistic phenomena that involve an unconscious entity, but are used to transfer information through language. For example: My watch says 7:03.
6 The word “to” is not presented here, for it has no role in the transitivity structure of the clause. According to Fawcett (Citation2000; Citation2008) and He et al. (Citation2015b), it is an Infinitive element to mark the non-finiteness of the Main Verb in the syntactic structure of the clause.
7 The semantic features refer to all the options in the systems representing the four (according to Halliday) or the eight (according to Fawcett) strands of meaning. Exactly, they include the experiential functions served by those elements in the transitivity structure of a process, the interpersonal functions served by those elements in the mood structure of an exchange, the textual functions served by those elements in the thematic structure of a message, etc. Simply speaking, the semantic features incorporate all the functions served by those elements involved in all the strands of meaning. Relevant semantic features would be collected in a series of traversals of the systems representing different strands of meaning when we produce a clause. This collection of semantic features then would be realized as a SINGLE syntactic structure, which in turn is expressed as a stretch of language.
8 As mentioned in Note 6, the Infinitive is a syntactic element serving no function in the transitivity structure of a process, but playing a role in the interpersonal strand of meaning, i.e., anchoring the dependent process time to the time established by the main process. Therefore, “to” is presented in the syntactic structure here.
9 According to He et al. (Citation2015a, 47–49), le (了, -ed) usually serves as an interpersonal element, i.e., Auxiliary, in a clause, delivering a deictic temporal meaning in a clause – past. And it is this usage that provides a clause with a different reading concerning its process type. As explained in He (Citation2017a), this usage may convert an action verb into a verb expressing a resulting existential situation. A similar usage is found in many ba-constructions, just like (3) and (4) here and some other examples in this study.
10 In this word-for-word translation, de and ge are not translatable, for de, as a mood particle, delivers a confirmative meaning; and ge is a measure word, which does not have a counterpart in English, as mentioned in Note 2.
11 Note that the deletion of ba changes the negative expression of the clause, for the Negator of a Chinese clause cannot be located before a nominal element, but usually comes before the verb.
12 The word le functions as the Process Extension in the transitivity structure of the clause to indicate the result of the action in question whereas it does not have a role in the transitivity structure of (26). Thus it is presented in the transitivity structure of (1) but missing in that of (26). A detailed explanation about the usage of le can be found in Note 13.
13 Note that le in instances like this clause can be interpreted in two ways. If the clause is in imperative mood, le is solely employed as a Process Extension to indicate the result of the action represented by the preceding verb, and in this sense, it acts as a “resultative verb complement”. If the clause is in declarative mood, it serves two functions: on the one hand, it is the Auxiliary element in the mood structure of the clause, which expresses a deictic temporal meaning, as mentioned in Note 8, and on the other, it functions as the Process Extension in the transitivity structure of the clause to indicate the result of the action in question. This is why we do not present its corresponding morpheme in the line of word-for-word translation of relevant examples in the present study if it is not confined to its interpersonal function. Those cases are (1) through (4).
14 As explained in Note 12, le may be solely confined to its interpersonal function, and if so, it falls outside of the transitivity structure in question, as shown by (5), (8), (11) and (28).
15 The word de (得) is not preserved in the representation of the transitivity structure, for it plays no part in the structure, and is just used to introduce the Process Extension you fei you chang into the dependent process. More details about the usage of de can be found in He and Yang (Citation2014).
16 The word le is presented here, the reason for which was provided in Note 12.