Abstract:
Despite a long and active history of linguistic research on Chinese, not many studies have been conducted in regard to auxiliary verbs in Modern Chinese, especially a comparison between Beijing Mandarin (BM) and Taiwan Mandarin (TM). There appears to be only one piece of work that is mainly focused on modal auxiliary verbs in BM and TM (Sanders, 1992). Moreover, those studies which mention auxiliary verbs tend to be quite introductory in terms of there being any detailed analysis of these verbs. Often these studies merely define what auxiliary verbs in Chinese (BM) are, briefly mention how sentences including these auxiliary verbs are constructed in Chinese (BM) and provide only a brief explanation of the general syntactic differences between BM and TM (Li, 1985; Crosland, 1998). This study aims to investigate any possibility that auxiliary verb meanings do not completely overlap in BM and TM, and to also examine the frequency of usage of auxiliary verbs in BM and TM. As a result of the investigation of the meanings and frequency of usage of specific auxiliary verbs between the two dialects (BM and TM), it has been found that two meanings of the auxiliary verbs keyi and yuanyi do not completely overlap in BM and TM; the particle ba appears in the sentence-final position when the sentence contains the modal yinggai expressing the meaning "probability - ought to or should". Moreover, it is also found that the modal meanings 'need' and 'would like to' expressed by the modal yao are the most comparable meanings between BM and TM. It has also been found that the negative form of the modal yao, i.e. buyao is the preferred form for the meaning 'prohibition' in TM, while speakers of Beijing Mandarin prefer to use bie.
