A corpus—based study of function words suoyi and keyi in Zuo Zhuan

【Abstract】This paper focuses on function words suoyi （所以） and keyi （可以） in Zuo Zhuan （《左传》）， analyzing their collocations and annotation distributions. Based on the BCC corpus， we found that keyi always collocated with a double negation and suoyi always stayed in a declarative sentence with a character ye （也）. Furthermore， it is found that the annotation of keyi is relatively centralized while the distribution of suoyi is more decentralized. When compared them in a sentence level， we found that sentences with the keyword suoyi always contained causality.

【Key words】suoyi； keyi； Zuo Zhuan； causality

【作者简介】齐术，北京航空航天大学外国语学院。

Zuo Zhuan is a significant history book in Pre-Qin period， with the characteristics of solemnity， elegance and concision. There are many studies based on Zuozhuan， including researching on function words and content words （He， 2004； Yi， 2005； Zhang， 2009）. Less attention has been paid on compound-function words. In Ancient Chinese， suoyi （所以） and keyi （可以） occupy the highest frequency in yi （以） construction.

Therefore， this paper attempts to uncover the semantic differences between suoyi （所以） and keyi （可以） from the perspective of lexical level and sentence level and try to figure out the reasons. We choose these two words as keywords to extract all the examples in Zuo Shi Chun Qiu （《左氏春秋》） in BCC corpus. Subsequently， we analyze every concordance with the keywords in BCC corpus to summarize their features.

The distributions of keyi shows that keyi with the meaning of “being able to/can” accounts for 89%. Besides， others annotations just account for 11%. Therefore， it is concluded that the annotations of keyi are relatively centralized， with the meaning of “being able to/can” as the center. In addition， there is also a strong connection between Ancient Chinese and Mandarin Chinese， because of the similar usage.

On the other hand， based on the analysis of BCC corpus， the result of the distributions of suoyi is different from keyi. The highest frequency accounts for 27.3%， which annotation is “the reason of”. Besides， suoyi with the meaning of “is used to” “therefore” “in order to” “is because of” also account for a certain proportion. It shows that there is no annotation plays as a dominate role. Instead， the distribution of suoyi presents a decentralized form， which is totally different from the distribution of keyi.

After comparing the differences between keyi and suoyi in a lexical level， we consider the differences in sentence level. Among the examples of keyi and suoyi， we have found that all these sentences with the keyword suoyi contain causality. However， keyi does not show this feature.

參考文献：

[1]何乐士.左传[M].语法研究：河南大学出版社，2012.