The Internal Structure of Sha-henda: A Morphological Perspective

Jiacing Ruan

Institute of Linguistics of National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan.

DOI: 10.4236/ojml.2014.44045                

Abstract

Sha-henda (殺很大) “kill-very-big” which is coined from an advertisement of an on-line game has been being recently very popular in Taiwan society. With the effect of this slogan, people tends to analogize more and more new expressions, for example: sheng-henda (省很大) “save-very-big”, shui-henda (睡很大) “sleep-very-big”, and etc. Until 2013, the quantity of the coined expressions is still increasing. In the previous studies of Shen (2009), Xiao (2009), Liu (2010) and Liu (2012) on the structure of X-henda (X-很大), the structure is highly productive, involves an extreme or exaggerative meaning, is featured of rising tone, stress, and lengthening, and is initiated with a verb or an adjective. This present study argues henda in X-henda is a bound form (or a particle (助詞); Chao, 1979), similar to qilai (起來) in X-qilai or bude (不得) in X-bude, especially without objects or objects-preceding. With Distributed Morphology, a derivational analysis of the X-henda structure indicates that the function of henda intensifies the effect of sha to the extreme degree with rising tone, stress and lengthening to perform exaggeration on the object (in a sentence). The results may further contribute to grammaticalization analyses, verb-complement structure analyses and Chinese language teaching.

Keywords

Morphology, Distributed Morphology, Grammaticalization, Verb-Complement

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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