On The Verb-copying Construction In Mandarin Chinese

Under the guidelines of three-dimensional grammar, this dissertation discusses the syntactic distribution, semantic features and pragmatic functions of verb-copying construction. It widens the range of verb-copying construction and deepens the study concerned. The paper consists of eight chapters and forewords and summary. The foreword part defines the verb-copying construction and the range of the study. It also points out the background and the significance of the study.The first chapter summarizes the studies done and points out the merits and demerits.The second chapter discusses the property of verb-copying construction and its place in the system of Chinese grammar, especially its place in the sentence pattern system.The third chapter is a multi-perspective and multi-level classification of the verb-copy construction according to the following six criterions. They are V+ auxiliary, V+prep, V+N according to the characteristics of the components after the copied verb; V+Obj., and V+comp. according to the structural relationship between the copied verb and the components thereafter; loose, and tight verb-copying according to the degree of freedom of the copied verb; full and part copied to the distribution of the copied verb and the copying verb; word or morpheme verb-copying construction according to the characteristics of the copied verb phrases and the volitional and nonvolitional verb-copying according to the semantic features of the copied verb.The fourth chapter mainly analyzes different kinds of the complements such as resultative, degree and state and objects such as patient, agent and location of the verb-copying construction and points out the characteristics of them. The fifth chapter is about the semantics of verb-copying construction. It concerns about the multi-dimensional semantic features of verb-copying construction, the semantic structure which possesses two verbs nuclear and the semantic orientation of the complements, which can be divided into self-oriented and he-oriented. The sixth chapter is about the pragmatic function of verb-copying construction including the theme and rhyme of the verb-copying construction, the focus of expression, asymmetry in different sentence kinds and in different text styles, and thereference of the objects.The seventh chapter makes a survey of the transformation from verb-copying construction to "ba" construction and "bei" construction.The eighth chapter is a case study of "yi＋V/V＋Np" construction.The last part summarizes the merits and demerits of this dissertation.