Chinese Constituent Order Study

A basic feature of the language symbol is linearity called constituent order in linguistics. The essence of languages determines that constituent order is either a kind of important grammatical form or a kind of important grammatical means. The research of constituent order is a significant question of study.Chinese is lacks of morphology and form changes. It mainly depends on word order and functional word to express definite grammatical meaning. The research of word order occupies an essential position in Chinese grammatical research.Word order and constituent order are different terms. However there are divergence about understanding and operation of these two words in syntax scope. Someone think that word order is equal to constituent order. In fact, the origin of divergence and confusion lies in no clearly understanding of the essential difference of these two terms. The composition units of Chinese have progressive lagers of Morpheme, Word, phrase and sentence.Each layer has a question of the internal parts' order. Word order is the internal order when phrase is composed of word and it includes morpheme order. Constituent order is the order on sentence level. In a broad sense, Constituent order includes word order.Constituent order is a grammatical means. It is not a dominant but a latent bondage. Constituent order like modified -tone for they all have the internal functional value. Constituent order has non-self-sufficient. A same syntactic construction usually has different deformations either having something to do with semantic or having something to do with pragmatic.So, we have to not only have our eyes on the sentence structure itself but also look for the answer from the humanistic and social circumstances to reach the scientific collusions.Owing to non-self-sufficient of constituent order, many scholars maintain the distinguishing of the three following sentence structure syntax, semantic and pragmatic.This is also the usage of "the Three plane Theory" in constituent order study. For example, "fine weather" is the same as "the weather is fine" in meaning but their sentence structures are different for the former is a structure of modification and the latter is a subject -predicate one. It is the difference of syntactic constituent order. "A cat snaps at a dog." is same as "A dog snaps at a cat" in the sentence structure but different from semantic. It is the difference of semantic constituent order. "Do you find your book?" is the same as "Do you find it, your book?" in meaning and sentence structure. But the places of their subject and predicate are different. It is the difference of pragmatic constituent order for the reversed place expresses the speaker's different mood. However, why Chinese's constituent order is such a kind of form? Fundamentally speaking, it is the language -in -itself factors including speech sounds, semantic and grammar that determines the constituent order. This is called the new "Three plane Theory" of constituent order's study.Phonetic constituent order is determined by the speech sounds in the syntactic construction. Semantic constituent order is the arranged order of the semantic parts expressed in the syntactic construction. These semantic parts include agent, object, outcome, instrument, purpose, fashion, time, place and reason, etc. The semantic law of word assembling is the language world consistent with the physical world. In the essay the author elaborated the centripetal structure and the centrifugal structure the two kinds of fundamental grammatical construction's semantic base.Grammatical constituent order is the arranged order of the grammatical parts in such grammatical structures as phrase, sentence, etc. The research of Chinese's grammatical constituent order is on the basic of the neutral pragmatic constituent order. The essay elaborated respectively the constituent order rules of such grammatical compositions as subject, predicate, object, attribute, adverbial, and complement, etc.Constituent order has four functions of sen...