A Research On The Morphology Of Modern Chinese

Compared with other grammatical issues,the thematic study of the inflectional morphology of modern Chinese(excluding dialects)is relatively lagging behind,with the focus of controversy mainly on the external inflected morphology.Guided by the morphological theory,this dissertation draws on relevant theories and research results such as linguistic typology and cognitive linguistics to make a systematic study of the inflectional morphological issues in the common language of modern Chinese,aiming to demonstrate that modern Chinese does have a relatively systematic form,while not making a special study on the usage of specific suffixes.Like other languages such as English,the grammatical meaning of Chinese needs to be expressed through morphology,with its own morphology.However,the morphology of Chinese also has its own particularities: 1)the attachment of the ending to the stem is not obvious;2)the universality of the ending use is not obvious either.This dissertation focuses on three major issues: First,through the comparison between Chinese and foreign languages,to demonstrate that modern Chinese has a relatively systematic form based on existing researches and Chinese facts.Second,through distinguishing between language and characters,to demonstrate that the attachment of endings to the stems is not obvious due to that it is covered up by Chinese characters.Third,by examining the morphological expressions,to show that the use of Chinese endings not obvious in general is in fact restricted by the tendency of Chinese paragraphs and prosodies rules.It consists of three parts: the first part(Chapters 1-4)is the theoretical part,which demonstrates that modern Chinese has inflectional morphology according to the theory of language morphology;the middle part(Chapters 5-8)is the fact part,which supports the view that modern Chinese has systematic inflectional morphology through case studies;the last part(Chapters 9-10)explains the motivation for the formation of Chinese inflectional morphology characteristics,and summarizes the main conclusions of this study,with details as follows:The first two chapters are the introduction and review part.It mainly introduces the necessity of systematic research on modern Chinese inflectional morphology.Since the first great discussion in the grammar reform movement in the 1930 s,the problem of Chinese morphology has not been systematically solved.However,many Chinese grammatical issues such as parts of speech classification,nominalization,and“Chinese Noun-verb Inclusion Hypothesis” are associated with the characteristics of Chinese morphology.The systematic study of Chinese morphology is of great significance to promote the research of Chinese grammar and to enrich the typology of human language morphology.It is also widely called for in the Chinese study community to study Chinese morphology based on Chinese ontology.Chapter Three discusses the evaluation criterion of inflection morphology on the systematic investigation of the properties of language morphology and holds that the morphology of a language is a phonetic change indicating grammatical meaning,which in writing corresponds to a change of word form.The core criterion of morphological measurement is to satisfy two necessary conditions simultaneously: 1)only add grammatical meaning to the stem without changing its lexical meaning;2)It has adhesion.The differences in the morphological attachment of different languages in writing are caused by the heterogeneity of writing systems.However,language and writing belong to different levels and are not the same thing,which cannot be confused.Furthermore,this chapter discusses the obligatoriness of inflectional morphology and points out that obligatoriness is not necessary for inflectional morphology measuring,which cannot be carried through in any languages.There is no sufficient logical basis for the inflectional endings that must be enforced.Chapter Four discusses the classification of inflectional morphology.According to its function,morphology can be classified into three types: syntactic morphology,semantic morphology,and pragmatic morphology.Syntactic morphology is an inflectional change that occurs when a word obtains the positional meaning of an unconventional syntactic position.For example,English verbs need to change their form when used as subjects;Form of the lexeme concerning for semantic categories such as number,tense,and aspect is termed in this paper as semantic morphology.Pragmatic morphology is a word form change that occurs due to the pragmatic needs of different emotional attitudes and subjective evaluations of the speaker under the constraints of communicative occasions,communicative intentions,participant roles and other pragmatic variables.Typical examples are the reduplication and diminutive marker in language,which can express subjectivity of the speaker.For instance,the diminutive affixes {IE} can be attached to the surname(John>Johnny)to express intimacy,relaxation,smallness,affectionate and other meanings,so as to reduce the seriousness of speech.Chapters Five and Six focus on semantic morphology.In these two chapters,it is claimed that the Chinese-men(们),-zhe(着),-le(了),-guo(过)and the English endings are analogical on the morphological functions: 1)both add grammatical meaning to the stems without affecting their lexical one;2)both are attached to the stems in pronunciation.The spelling of the-men,-zhe,-le,-guo is separated from the stems because Chinese characters are of ideography property.However,if written in Pinyin-men,-zhe,-le,-guo are also attached to the verbs like the English endings.All these endings are restricted by the semantic features of stems and the syntactic elements in sentences at the static and dynamic levels respectively.However,its internal motivation is driven by the principle of the unity of language form and meaning,which is the same as other human languages.In addition,the usage of-men(们)is also regulated by the definiteness of-men(们)and its process of grammaticalization.Chapter Seven mainly focuses on the pragmatic morphology of Chinese.Chinese inflectional ending-r(儿)and the English diminutive marker {IE} are consistent in the morphological functions and conform to the criterion of morphological measurement standard.The ending-r(儿)’s occurrence is under the restriction of pragmatic variables and belongs to pragmatic morphology.The diminutive meaning of ending-r(儿)originated from the concept of ‘child’ and gradually extended to indicate smallness,affection,etc.,with the expansion of the scope of use.The pragmatic meaning of non-serious was also derived from its functional expansion.Because small and familiar children,animals,or objects are more likely to be associated with psychological feelings of pity,intimacy,ease,casualness,etc.,which is a reflection of the language form of human life experience.This paper also discusses the use of-r(儿)ending.Whether a noun can take this ending is constrained by the stem features of [±smallness] and [±familiarity] on the lexical level and affected by pragmatic variables such as communicative situations,relationships,and attitudes at the communicating level.Chapter Eight studies syntactic morphology.Chinese verbs and adjectives bear no morphological marking when in subject or object positions.However,nouns,verbs,and adjectives require a marker-de(的/地)when its modification function is not clear in the unconventional syntactic positions like attributive and adverbial,but-de(的/地)can also be omitted or is used to highlight the modifier or rhythm harmony when its functional role is clear.Hence,there is a small amount of syntactic morphology in Modern Chinese.The motivation behind it is the competition between language iconicity and the economy.It’s claimed that in Chinese,most of the combinations of parts of speech with their unconventional syntactic positions do not need to take any overt form unless their functional roles are confused due to the dominance of language economy,because this kind of usage is seldom used and limited to occasions,the additional temporary meaning also does not affect understanding,morphological marking is therefore not necessary.In this regard,it saves effort in syntagmatic relations and avoids increasing the derived words that need to be stored in the database,which can effectively reduce the burden of storage and memory.Chapter Nine explains the reason why Chinese morphology can be omitted in certain contexts.When the syntactic context can clearly indicate the grammatical meaning of endings,Chinese endings can be omitted and simplified because of the Chinese heavy parataxis nature,while the deeper reason lies in the Chinese nation’s emphasis on holistic cosmology and intuitive thinking.The use of morphological markers constrained by the language parataxis organization method is universal.In many languages such as Turkish and Finish,there are also cases where the accusative,dative and plural markers do not need to be used when the meaning is clear.In addition,the occurrence of Chinese endings can sometimes be explained by the rhythm tendency of the Chinese language.Restricted by the disyllabic tendency of the Chinese and the Chinese nation’s long-standing pursuit of prosodic beauty,Chinese endings are sensitive to the number of syllables in their stems.Chinese endings are also added or deleted in utterances for the requirements of symmetrical rhythm and harmony in syllable combinations.It is a common phenomenon in human languages that linguistic rhythms affect morphological performance,and the endings of English and other languages also have requirements for prosodic properties of stems.Chapter Ten mainly summarizes the research results of this dissertation,pointing out the deficiencies of the present study and the prospects for future research.