On The Expectation Category In Modern Chinese

Fundamental concepts and theories on cognitive linguistics are utilized in this dissertation to probe into expectation and semantic system of expectation in Modern Chinese,and the interactive relationship between expectation and other grammatical categories,such as irrealis,evidentiality,modality and counterfactual,in order to establish a relatively complete interpretive system with grammatical forms of expectation,hence improving the comprehension of expectation and expectation expressions in Mandarin Chinese to further extent.The dissertation includes eight chapters.In chapter one,the introduction part consists in the objects for examining,the significance of the research,the range of argument,the approach of analyzing,the background of related theories and explanation of the corpora's origin.Chapter two retrospect the studies of expectations in psychology and linguistics,analyzes their connections and differences,and points out that studies on expectation in linguistics springs and develops by taking advantage of the fruits of psychology studies.This chapter also analyzes the achievements and problems in scholars' studies of Modern Chinese expectations,to get a general understanding on the existing research.By further stating the essential factors contained in the analyzed definitions and types of expectations,the essay defines expectations as "The speaker's 'expected' or'unexpected' subjective attitude towards the proposition or event expressed in the sentence".Based on its semantic characteristics,expectation is divided into two sub-categories:in-expectation and counter-expectation.This chapter also discusses a group of concepts on expectation,such as "expectation and the irrealis","expectation and evidentiality","expectation and modality" and "counter-expectation and counterfactual",in the hope of deepening the understanding of the essence of expectation.Chapter three examines the prime expressions of expectation in Modern Chinese.Based on the theory of typical categories in cognitive linguistics,the typical expressions of expectation in Mandarin Chinese are determined,and the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features of the expressions are also summarized in this chapter.From chapter four to chapter seven,this essay respectively examines the syntactic and semantic features of the four typical expressions of expectation,including guoran,jingran,buxiang and the guiyang dialect ba1.Chapter four and chapter five focus on the unbalance phenomenon in the semantic interpretation of typical polysemic modal verbs used together with guoran and jingran,and explains the reasons.Chapter six focuses on the lexicalization of buxiang and chapter seven focuses on the special counter-expectation meaning of the guiyang dialect ba1.Chapter eight is the conclusion,which summarizes the main ideas of this thesis,and points out some topics deserved to be discussed further.