The Differences between Na (拿) and Dai (帶) in Mandarin Chinese_4

Mandarin Chinese has long been considered arduous for speakers of other languages. This is probably because Chinese characters are extremely complicated, if not confusing, in terms of either their usage or their semantic meanings. Specifically, a Chinese character or a word/phrase that has more than one part of speech in different contexts or belongs to more than one word category is even more difficult for those speakers to handle. For example, Shang (上, i.e., in, on, upper, previously) belongs to at least four different word categories in different context; likewise, the similar meaning between two words —Yin Qi (引起, i.e., to cause or to give rise to) and Zao Cheng (造成, i.e., lead to or to result in) or Shuo Ming (說明, i.e. to show) and Jie Shi (解釋, i.e. to explain), and the most confusing pairs are Na (拿, i.e. to take) and Dai (帶, i.e. to bring). The two characters seem semantically overlapping on the surface. However, the two characters are actually really distinct from each other. On one hand, the usage of these two words is sometimes overlapping, but they are not the same under certain circumstances. On the other hand, both of them individually have many different parts of speech, which means the usage of these two words changes once their parts of speech change. In fact, even for the native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, they may not be aware of the differences in these two words. Drawing on the difficulty in distinguishing Na (拿) and Dai (帶), the researcher of this study intend to perform an corpus analysis on them using the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese[1] (中研院現代漢語平衡語料庫), Sinica Corpus in short. In the following section, the researcher will introduce how this task is performed in detail.

In this part researcher will show the reader the analysis of Dai. According to Sinica Corpus Dai possesses six word categories, which are D (adverb), Na (noun), Nf (classifier), Nc (place), VC (transitive verb with action), VB (transitive verb with action which requires the object fronted or the object preceded by a preposition). The six word categories all represent different meanings. Below is the analysis:

1. D (adverb)

一晚上下來，連掃 帶 吸，收穫豐富，可也把人累壞了。

after a night, sweeping as well as vacuuming, gaining a lot, but feeling exhausted.

Here, Dai is an adverb which shows that two actions (sweeping and vacuuming) are done at the same period of time.

[1] Sinica Corpus has 17,554,089 character token and collects 19,247 articles of literature, life, social studies, science, philosophy and art from 1981 to 2007.