A Study On The Choice Of Event Structure And Prepositional

The use of Chinese prepositions is the key and difficult point of second languageacquisition. Scholars made deep probe and study so as to help second languagelearners master the use of Chinese prepositions quickly and efficiently and to avoiderrors. In Chinese, each preposition serves multiple functions, which makes the useof Chinese prepositions complicated. In general, learners are more likely to miss thepoint if they make more detailed sorting out to Chinese prepositions and deepersynonym discrimination. This thesis attempts to explore the regularities ofprepositions in sentence structure through Event Structure Theory. The followingreasons can account for its benefits. First, Event Structure Theory makes emphasis oncognitive experience of real events of people’s real lives, whose intercommunity ofhuman beings help leave out those abstract grammatical explanations and easy tounderstand. Second, it uses the psychological reality of language learners to explorethe rules of sentence structure and accords with the second language learners’mental process in linguistic coordination from sentence meaning, which makesgrammar study truly serve Chinese teaching. Third, in event structure, the identity ofevent roles becomes relatively simple, thus, it can avoid making confusions inunderstanding the different semantic roles of the same preposition.The thesis pays more attention to study those frequently-used prepositions,such as从，自，打，由，自打，自从，从打，在，当，于，至，到，etc. in termsof their functions of time expressing. First, the thesis begins with quantitative studyand qualitative analysis based on the data to make certain its range and rate. Second,the writer makes a detailed description about the semantic functions of timeprepositions and their phrases in event structure, the qualities of the timeprepositions, the frame and semantic meaning of time prepositions. Then, the thesisdifferentiates and explains the use of time prepositions from the perspective of therelationship between the preposition’s time expression and the event’s timeattribute. Finally, through the point of context-oriented time expressions andtime-highlighted expressions, the thesis draws the continuum between them according to the different salience in event structure of prepositional phrases’time-semantic elements.Guided by syntax, semantics and pragmatics, combined with Event-SemanticTheory, Image-Schemata Theory, Information Structure Theory, Prototype CategoryTheory and Syntactic Transformation Methods, the thesis does a separate study onthe time-expressing functions of frequently-used prepositions in Chinese. It avoidsthe confusions of various functions of the same preposition, and makes it possible toset up a relationship between the different expressing functions of the samepreposition so as to form a system. The thesis also introduces the concept “context”to Chinese grammar study, makes a systematic and reasonable explanation to thefunctions in the time expressions of the preposition and its phrases. In the thesis, thecontinuum between context-oriented time expressions and time-highlightedexpressions of time-expressing prepositions and the transform analysis incontext-oriented time sentences and event-highlighted sentences will provide areference for foreign Chinese teaching practice.