Idioms are an important part of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL), but current research on the meanings and grammatical functions of idioms is still quite weak. This study selected commonly used idioms in TCSL, extracted sentences containing these idioms from large-scale modern Chinese corpora, and manually annotated the meaning and grammatical functions of each idiom in these sentences.It then analyzed the characteristics of the idioms in TCSL and revealed the importance of meanings and grammatical functions in idiom teaching. This study further examined the problems of the idioms in textbooks and learner's dictionaries, proposed methods and principles for setting example sentences, and introduced how to carry out idiom teaching. This research not only provides theoretical and practical references for Chinese language teachers and learners, but also helps to promote the development of textbook editing, dictionary compilation, and idiom teaching.
Leech’s corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed the steep decline of all modal verbs together, which he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society. This study inspired many diachronic and synchronic studies, mostly on English modal verbs and largely assuming the correlation between the use of modal verbs and power relations. Yet, there are continuing debates on sampling design and the choices of corpora. In addition, this hypothesis has not been attested in any other language with comparable corpus size or examined with longitudinal studies. This study tracks the use of Chinese modal verbs from 1901 to 2009, covering the historical events of the New Culture Movement, the establishment of the PRC, the implementation of simplified characters and the completion and finalization of simplification of the Chinese writing system. We found that the usage of modal verbs did rise and fall during the last century, and for more complex reasons. We also demonstrated that our longitudinal end-to-end approach produces convincing analysis on English modal verbs that reconciles conflicting results in the literature adopting Leech’s point-to-point approach.
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