The Distribution Of Parts Of Speech In Syntactic Structure From Prototype

This article suggests that the only possible correlation between parts of speech and syntactic elements is that a word has its specific part of speech, while a part of speech has its specific syntactic position. This article reviewed existing researches on the relationship between Chinese parts of speech and syntactic elements and proposes that returning to Wang Li’s “a word has its specific part of speech” and “flexible utilization of parts of speech” can help us find an appropriate starting point for further research. Consequently this article reviewed proves obtained in fields like children’s linguistic acquisition and neurolinguistics, as well as theoretical achievements on construction grammar proposed by Croft(2001)and Bybee(2010). It tries to investigate the essence of “a word has its specific part of speech” and “flexible utilization of parts of speech” in perspective of construction grammar, and suggests that parts of speech are a system of equilibrium, therefore the perspective of static parts of speech cannot solve the problem about the relationship between parts of speech and syntactic elements. This article also abandoned the traditional idea which treat syntactic elements as syntactic units, and propose that subjective, predicate and objective respectively represent an area in the space of word sequence-semantics. Inside them there are various syntactic positions instead of only one, and these positions can overlap each other. This article applied the concept of “slot” from construction grammar and suggests that in prototypical construction, a slot is highly corresponding with a specific part of speech. And then this article analyzed a text of 130,000 Chinese characters from Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese, based on which we drew a figure about positions of these slots in the space of word sequence-semantics, and further composed a prototypical construction of Chinese, which excluded the concept of traditional syntactic elements, and can represent the common features of Chinese syntax.