A Study Of The "Zuzhi" Group In Chinese

This paper focuses on such preventing verb group in mordern Chinese which fall into the category of "prevention" as prevent, forbid, deter, intervene, impede, block and thwart. Usages and accessory meaning that cohere in these seven verbs vary from word to word apart from their core rational meanings being the same and therefore the correlation of the interior members within the group is a general resemblance with minor differences and vice versa. Based upon sufficicent language materials retrieved from the corpus of Peking University, the preventing verb group is described and analysed to deepen the knowledge of the words of this category in terms of semantics, syntax and pragmatics by adopting interpretations from varieties of dictionaries.Semantically, sememe analysis is capitalized on to analyse the characteristics of conceptual and inferential meaning of three subclasses belonging to the preventing verb group, thereby identifying their differences and similarities as well as universalities and minute discrepencies of individual interior members of each subclass.Syntactically, the analysis revolves around the syntactical function of the preventing verb group which can not only be followed by object ranging from nomimal to predicate to clause but also serve as subject, object or attributive.Pragmatically, an analysis to compare use frequency across a range of verbs of this category shows forbid and thwart are most and least frequently used respectively. When it comes to sentence type distribution, these verbs are appropriate in declarative sentences and questions but not in exclamatory sentences among which forbid can be used in imperative sentences, while the other verbs are no exception. When it comes to sentence style distribution, analysis of these seven verbs appearing in politica, scientific, official and literary documents succeeds that of their different usages in both written language and colloquialism.