Collostructional analysis on Chinese modal verb construction neng bu neng + VP

Abstract This paper aims to investigate the meanings of Chinese neng (modal verb) bu (negative word) neng (modal verb) + VP construction and explores the meaning motivations behind them. The present paper employs the method of collostructional analysis, R software and BLCU Corpus Center1 (BCC) are used to process the linguistic data. It is found that the prototypical meaning of the target construction is “let something (not) happen or let someone (not) do something” with the sense of negotiation and interaction and its extensional meanings include “getting an expected result”, “continuation”, “obtaining”, “specific actions containing causation, motion, communication, vision, life, and mental activities”. The meaning motivations of the construction lie in the force experience of human from his/her interaction with the outside world, and in the semantic interaction of its constituent words neng and bu.