A Cognitive Study Of Descriptive Adjectives In Mandarin Chinese

Descriptive adjectives in modern Chinese are mainly constituted by the means of reduplication or attachment on the base of attributive ones. Attachment, especially reduplication are quite unique ways to coin new words. Although the lexical meanings of descriptive adjectives are identical with those of their corresponding attributive ones, the grammatical meaning of them is definitely different. It is the above-mentioned duality which constitutes great significance.The descriptive adjectives is one of the most popular aspects in the field of part speech research which takes both structuralism and function-cognition grammar for as theory background. However, disputes arise no matter on syntactic nature, semantic features and pragmatic display. The thesis weighes function and cognitive grammar and probes into some controversial phenomena of descriptive adjectives through the angles of semantics and pragmatics.The whole thesis is composed of 8 chapters. After analyzing the grammar nature of ABB construction on the synchronic and diachronic level, the 1st chapter finds that the construction of BB is not necessarily affix on the synchronic level. Therefore, for the construction of ABB, the structure of word formation may take the form of subject-predicate, co-ordination or complement except for attachment.Investigations are conducted in the 2nd chapter into examples reasons the co-ordinate double-syllable attributive adjectives can be reduplicated into the construction of AABB. It is found that , on the static lever, it is probable for those double-syllable attributive adjectives, which are semantic-concrete, degree-hidden and colloquial, to be reduplicated while, on the dynamic level, such restrictions can be ignored.The 3rd chapter examines the quantity presentation of descriptive adjectives and finds that prominent quantity, fixed quantity, high quantity and subjective quantity are their features. Furthermore, the quantity of the subcategory or descriptive adjectives can be show from high scale to low scale in this way: BA or AA > AABB > ABB > AAde.By examining the inner quantity presentation of ABB construction, the 4th chapter finds that the quantity scale of ABB construction constituted by various BB and the same A, varies according to the sonority of BB: the higher the sonority is, the higher the scale is and vice versa.The 5th chapter examines the concerning factors which affect the quantity scale of descriptive adjectives and finds that syntactic position and pragmatic environment chiefly influence the words of AAde construction. However, the ending modal "!!!" exerts overwhelming influence upon the subcategory of descriptive adjectives.Through the comparison of the combination of descriptive adjectives and their corresponding adjectives both with nominals in the context of sentences, the 6 chapter finds that attributive adjectives will be prominent in predicate place and descriptive ones in modifier place, which is the reflection of "reference-object" construction in discourse.The 7th chapter discusses the sentence whose descriptive adjectives in adverbial position semantically point to the object and generalizes the semantics of the typical sentence pattern of "semantically pointing to object". It also examines their presentation in texts from the transitivity theory and discovers that such typical sentence pattern often works as foreground information while, for the non-typical ones of the kind, it generally works as background information.The 8th chapter examines the situations of the combination of descriptive adjectives and analyzes the accessibility scales of them. The sequencing principle when descriptive adjectives are put together is that the higher the accessibility it is, the more front it comes.