The Study Of Tool-holding Monosyllabic Hand Verbs In Modern Chinese

Tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs, as a part of modern Chinese hand verbs, have their own characteristics. In this paper, tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs are defined as the research object. Based on the modern Chinese synchronic level, using a large number of corpuses, the study discusses the tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs from their syntactic distribution, semantic features and pragmatic functions under the guidelines of three-dimensional grammar.In the preface, the essay defines the tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs, introduces the theoretical and practical significances of this study and the method we use on the research of tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs in modern Chinese. It also reviews the research and the works on the tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs.The first chapter investigates the using frequency of tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs and classifies the tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs according to the hand verb standard and the standard of body part which are involved in, then further classifies by the features of tools which are used. Thus, we find out that the frequency of”砍” is the highest and “扎(zā)” is the lowest.The second chapter mainly describes their syntactic features, contains analyzing and studying the syntactic distribution, and their objects and complements are diverse. Besides, it analyzes their sentence structures and finds out the main sentence structures.The third chapter analyses the semantic features of tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs. We mainly focus on abstracting the attributes of the tool-holding hand verbs. We conclude the common semantic category of the tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs by analyzing sentences. The essay extracts the verbs’ semantic distinction among various members through analyzing the meaning of dictionary entries. Then we summarize each meaning of the prime characteristics with corpus.The fourth chapter is mainly about the pragmatic function of the tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs including classification, rhetoric and style. It was found that the tool-holding monosyllabic hand verbs can be used as metaphor, personification and metonymy flexibly. It is also shown that the tool-holding hand verbs have the disproportion in style and category based on corpus statistics.