On the Argument Structures of the Transitive Verb 'annoy; be annoyed; bother to do': A Study Based on Two Comparable Corpora

This paper investigates the transitive uses of the verb fan „annoy; be annoyed; bother to do‟, which exhibit both similarities and disparities between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, as far as the data from Gigaword corpus, containing data from Mainland China (XIN) and Taiwan (CNA), are concerned. In terms of similarities, the causative (and agentive) use(s) of the transitive fan is/are shared by both Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. The disparity mainly lies in the mental use of fan „be annoyed‟, which is not only unattested in the corpus of Taiwan Mandarin but also reported as weird by our informants. This mental use, on the other hand, is well attested in the corpus. In order to describe as well as explain the difference in uses between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, we adopt the Theta System Theory (Reinhart 2002; Marelj 2004) to probe into the argument structures of the transitive verb fan and further pinpoint the fundamental syntactic difference between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, that is, the absence or presence of the /+c feature in the argument structure. In particular, Taiwan Mandarin requires the obligatory presence of the /+c feature in the argument structure of fan, while Beijing