A Quantitative-Qualitative Analysis of the Profiling Features of BA-Sentences

The distinctive feature of BA-sentence is described as meaning-form relations of its strongly profiled object. Structurally, this object is marked by “BA” and precedes the verb. Semantically, it conveys a caused-change conceptual meaning. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative analysis, this paper argues that BA-sentences do exhibit profiling features, including those with implicit caused-change meanings. Furthermore, the analysis confirms that the BA-sentences with explicit expressions of the caused-change meaning are more prototypical than its implicit counterparts.