A Study Of Word Order In Modern Chinese From The Perspective Of Cognition

The dissertation studies the relative issues about the words order of ModernChinese with the theories of Cognitive Linguistics from the perspective of forms. Thewords order in this dissertation covers some special sentence pattern, phrasestructures and complex sentences.With the description of them in details, thedissertation will discuss the mechanism of the word order flexibility and focus on therelevance among the three dimensions of grammar, semantics and pragmatics. Theresearch shows that the variability of the words order is not temporary, but theprocess from a temporary pragmatic phenomenon to a solid grammar rule.Thevariability of words order breaks through grammar rules in some degrees and reactson the grammar rules.Chapter One, Intruduction. This chapter sorts out the relevant domestic andoverseas researches on words order. It reflects that fixation and flexibility are the twosides of Modern Chinese words order. There exist the connection and differences.The flexibility shows the subjectivity of languages which is the objectives of cognitiverules in languages.So it’s necessary to study the flexibility of Chinese words ordersystematically from the pespective of cognition.Chapter Two, this chapter studies the markedness ranks of “ba”constructionwith the markedness theory with the result that the three dimensions of Chinese arerelevant. With the reanalysis of “ba”（把）construction, the continmmum ofcorrespondence between marked degrees and words order is: syntactic words order＞semantic words order＞pragmatic words order (high marked degree), which isproved by “bei”（被）construction showing that the higher a marked degree is, themore it tends to the interpretation of pragmatic words order.Chapter Three, this chapter, with the exmaple of the structure “personalpronoun+quantity/demostrative quantity+NP denoting human” as anexample,describes and explains the characters of words order and reasons ofco-occurrence construction of personal pronoun and quantity/demostrativequantity,explains the axxessibility of the structure of“personal pronoun+quantity/demostrative quantity+NP denoting human”, and explores the interacitonbetween them to form a markedness mode of three dismensions under the accessibility theory.Chapter Four, this chapter investigates the two special separated structrues asdisyllable verb-resultant structure which can be separated and quantiative stucturesof approximate quantity （“N+Duo（多）+M”和“N+M+Duo（多）”）. The dissertationthinks that construction is not changeless, but flexible in words order,and theChinese language facts should be emphasized while referencing the westerntheories.Chapter Five, the chapter with the theory of focus, thinks the mark of focus isdifferent in the gradation of emphasis on syntactic element from in the degree.Different positions of “de”（的）will cause the problem whether the sentence isgrammatical or the meaning changes. And it finds the relevance and the cognitivereason between different emphatic sentences.Chapter Six, the chapter inspects the displacement of Modern Chinese. On thebasis of the former researches, it thinks that displacement has effect on the syntacticrule from pragmatic dimension, the result of displacement is to form the sentencefinal topic focus, the sentence final discourse mark and the sentence final moodfocus.Chapter Seven, this chater, with the theory of figure-background,investigate the varieties of words order of Modern Chinese complex sentences. Itfinds that the variation of words order is selective,and the interconversion betweenthe figure and the background is the cognitive psychological basis for the variationsof words order of complex sentences, which is universal. The increasing anddecreasing of marks is the syntactic way of words order variations. The changes ofwords order is arranged deliberately by the speaker, which reflects both thesubjectivity of language expressions and the divisions of language expressivefunctions of different words order.Chapter Eight, conclusion. This chapter concludes that the flexibility of wordsorder is the manitestation of multifarious language functions. The insufficiencies inthis dissertation and topics to be further discussed are also pointed out.