A Syntactic And Functional Study Of One-word Sentences In Modern Chinese

In the language of modern Chinese for daily communication,there are some expressions or utterances that have only a single word or phrase.These expressions are extremely simple in structure.These expressions can fully convey the speaker’s emotion,intention,and attitude just like the sentences that have the complete structure of subject plus predicate.The scholars refer to this type of language as one-word sentences.It can be inferred from the name that one-word sentences have special attributs in both form and meaning.Here “one-word” embodies the meaning of incompleteness in structure,as it’s the common sense that a complete sentence contains a subject as well as a predicate.And “sentence” shows that one-word sentences possess the complete function like a subject-predicate sentence dose.They can be employed as the vehicles that are effective in daily communication.One-word sentences are frequently used in daily communication in spite of their marginal area in the linguistic system.Therefore,the values of one-word sentences need to be further excavated.The previous studies of one-word sentences mainly focus on the definition,classification and pragmatic analysis.The significance of such expressions has not been fully paid attention to.Moreover,the works of rough definitions and classifications are not enough to describe and dig out the attributes of one-word sentences.The present study will start with syntactic and functional features of the one-word sentences,and then find the connection between them,so as to make a new interpretation and description of this kind of language.In this thesis,the study of one-word sentences is devoted to the following questions.First of all,the one-word sentences in modern Chinese are the same in form,but they are not homogeneous in syntactic structure and function;what are the discrepancies? Secondly,what are the respective relationships between the different syntactic structures and the different functions of one-word sentences? Finally,what is the connection between the syntactic features and functions of the one-word sentences?In order to solve the above questions,this thesis mainly describes and analyzes the language data to support the main findings and points of view.The one-word sentences mainly exist in the colloquial style;the data of the present thesis are collected from the daily communication,some of which are made by the author.And some of the data are from dialogues of literary works,crosstalk as well as the social network.The analysis of the one-word sentences will be based on the following steps.The first step is to analyze and compare the syntactic structure of the one-word sentences according to the syntactic operation principle in the generative grammar.Then from the angle of interjection,the author will analyze and explain the relationship between the different syntactic structures of the one-word sentences.Finally,the function of the one-word sentences are explained under the guidance of Popper’s theory of language function hierarchy,at the same time,the relation between the syntax and function of the one-word sentences will be further illustrated.Here are the main findings:(1)In terms of structural characteristics of syntax,one-word sentences can be divided into two kinds: structurally dependent one-word sentences and structural independent ones.Among them,the syntactic structural dependent ones of the one-word sentences equal to the elliptical sentences.In this case,the speaker omitted other parts of a complete sentence and just spoke out the word that conveys the most important information.As for one-word sentences of independent structure,the words in them fail to be combined with other words.These words lack the syntactic ability of being extended into larger units;instead,they appear as independent units or are loosely attached to another sentence.In the pragmatic use of these one-word sentences,they serve as the additional components to convey the emotion,intention and attitude of the speaker,so as to enhance the credibility of the language.(2)The one-word sentences of the non-reference words are structural independent,here non-reference words refer to those whose meaning or sense have no referents in the actual world,such as interjections.Most of the structural dependent one-word sentences of substantival words are structural dependent.However,there are still some one-word sentences of substantival words which are independent in syntactic structure,and words in these one-word sentences are the result of interjectionalization.During this process,the meanings of them are bleached and their syntactic attributes are becoming weak.(3)According to Popper’s view on the functional hierarchy of the human language,the one-word sentences of independent structure can only achieve the primary expressive function and signal function.The one-word sentences of dependent structure have more sophisticated functions besides the primary ones.The functions of higher level are descriptive function and argumentative function.In conclusion,the present thesis is devoted to describing and explaining the characteristics of the one-word sentences in modern Chinese from a new perspective,so as to make a modest contribution to further studies on this topic.