汉语动词“吞”的宾语搭配分析

Abstract

Existing studies of Chinese ingestion verbs have focused mainly on high-frequency verbs such as chi (“eat”) and he (“drink”), leaving the verb tun (“swallow”) and its object collocations understudied. This study addresses this gap using the literary sub-corpus of BCC. From 278 retrieved entries, 255 valid entries were retained and analyzed qualitatively with manual annotation and auxiliary frequency counts. The study identifies three senses of tun: “swallow without chewing,” “engulf,” and “embezzle/appropriate.” Nominal objects are distributed across these senses at 75.47%, 18.87% and 5.66%, respectively. Sense (1) collocates mainly with food items and biological parts; sense (2) with natural objects; sense (3) is dispersed and mainly economic. As the sense extends from physiological action to resultative and social-behavioral meanings, object range contracts and semantic selectivity weakens. The study contributes to research on ingestion verbs by showing how object semantic classes constrain sense selection, with implications for dictionary compilation and Chinese vocabulary teaching. The literary sub-corpus may inflate metaphorical usage, a limitation to be addressed in future multi-register research.