Feasibility of Direct Language Transfer of the Verb “to Eat” from Cantonese to Mandarin

The verb “to eat” is commonly used in both Cantonese and Mandarin. According to the analysis result, we can see that the most frequently occurring senses of the verb in both languages are “to ingest”. Even though both Cantonese and Mandarin use the same set of Chinese characters, the verb “to eat” in both languages does not develop into the same set of senses. From the employed dictionaries and corpora, the number of senses of the verb in both languages are 11, while the developed pathways follow the ingestion process. After comparing the similar senses, we found that even for the same senses, the verb “to eat” in a Mandarin sentence cannot be replaced by the Cantonese one directly, while the objects in the sentences of both languages are different due to the lexical difference between the languages. The above analysis provides an insight for designing the Mandarin teaching materials on the verb “to eat” to the native Cantonese students.