Modern Day Han Modality Comparison Studies

With the objective approach to sentence in linguistics shifting to the subjective one, modality study has experienced an unprecedented development. The independent and contrast researches into modality of Chinese & Japanese have been an indispensable part of modality study among the world languages. The development of Japanese-Chinese (Sino-Japanese) contrastive linguistics in the field of modality meets the needs of language teaching and language research.The study further clarifies the basic concepts, the difference and universals, and typological particularities of modal systems in modern Japanese & Chinese. With a typological approach, modal systems of Japanese and Chinese are studied from both macro and micro perspectives. We attempt to provide a theoretical basis for Japanese & Chinese international education and Japanese language education in China.The dissertation consists of ten chapters, about 210 thousand words (Chinese characters).The first chapter introduces the background, purpose, significance, objects, the content, methods, and corpus sources of the study.In ChapterⅡ, the dissertation clarifies the basic concepts and the theoretical foundation to address the problem of unclear basic concepts and the system of modality. It introduces main schools and basic concepts, ideas, stances, and methods of modern Japanese modality. It also makes a retrospection on modality research of modern Chinese.In ChapterⅢ, from the typological perspective, the dissertation discusses specificity and implicational universals of Japanese and Chinese modality, further clarifies the typology features and characteristics of Japanese and Chinese modality. Grammatically modal system and mood occur within Japanese, and modal system is much more salient than mood. Mood system of Japanese is essentially different from that of Indo-European language. Traditionally, mood of Japanese is discussed within the modal system. Both modal system and mood occur within Chinese and the way in which Chinese deal grammatically with modality is mainly represented in terms of modal system. The Ⅷconcept of"语气"in modern Chinese study is closer to the concept of "modality". Japanese and Chinese have differences in the modal types of modality, modal carriers, micro-concepts, expressions, word order, sentence structure and other areas.Chapter IV, from the typological perspective, tries to make a classification of modern Japanese modality and the relation between modality and sentence types. A macroscopic comparison basis is established between Japanese and Chinese modal systems.Japanese modality can be classified into six types:dynamic modality, deontic modality, act modality, epistemic modality, attitudinal modality. Based on the modal types, the volitive sentence can be separated out from the traditional declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentence in Japanese. The Chinese modal system can be divided into four types of dynamic modality, deontic modality, epistemic modality and attitudinal modality. Modal systems of the dissertation are built on the basis of modal markers, of which the central part is modal verb.In Chapter V, empirical research is conducted by Chinese and Japanese contrastive corpus, so as to provide data support for related research. The investigation is carried out by selecting the Chinese modal verbs with the high usage rate and the typical Japanese modal markers, and extracts examples from CJCS (2003). The defects and the problems of the current empirical research based on the database and corpus are also described.Chapter VI, according to the modal classification of chapter IV, based on the statistical database of chapter V, discusses Japanese & Chinese modal markers from the angles of semantics, syntax, polarity, tense and so on. The related modal markers include:the deontic and act modality of (?) (?), epistemic modality of (?) (?), markers with polysemy of (?)'应该(该,应,应当,当)","要","好"and"会""可以(可)""得dei,必须""能(能够)". ChapterⅥdiscusses the comparison between similar modal markers of (?) (?)etc, which have different characteristics in the tendency of determining benchmark, behavior & situation's controllability and freedom degree. In chapter VI, the author also analyses the essence and the feature of the Japanese and Chinese modal markers. In addition, discussion was made here on whether the Chinese deontic modal verbs have imperative functions. It is considered that the Chinese deontic modal verbs do not have independent imperative function, and an independent act modal system doesn't exist in Chinese.ChapterⅦ, the author makes contrastive studies of Japanese and Chinese based on the typological platform constructed in chapterⅣ, discusses the characteristics of Japanese and Chinese modality. The main contents include the differences between Japanese and Chinese modality in sentence structure, hierarchy structure, modal systems, modal markers, semantic, syntax, tense, polarity, verbs and other aspects. The common points on Japanese and Chinese modality are also discussed. ChapterⅦattempts to make Japanese-Chinese contrastive research on semantics or modal system by using the semantic map and further points out the defects of semantic map explanation. ChapterⅦalso involves the issues of whether Japanese modal markers are monosemic, the relation and grammaticalization of Japanese epistemic and deontic modality, semantic analysis and double negation, etc.ChapterⅧdescribes a study of co-occurrence and collocation of modality. First, we generalize the features, essence, structure, semantic of the Japanese co-occurrence patterns. Second, Japanese-Chinese contrastive research is carried out on sentence structure, type, number of items and the semantic of the co-occurrence. We find that Japanese and Chinese co-occurrence patterns have the reverse order. However, a universal can be found behind the reverse surface from the typological perspective. ChapterⅧalso makes a microscopic comparison on co-occurrence problem between "べきだ" and''应该"It's found that "べきだ" and"应该"seem to have the same co-occurrence order but they are essentially different.In ChapterⅨ, based on the current state of Japanese language education in China and Chinese native speaker's Japanese learning situation, the dissertation describes the role and the necessity of the Japanese-Chinese (Sino-Japanese) contrast research from the linguistic perspective. Currently in the field of Japanese education in China, contrastive analysis has played an important role in negative transfer of mother language. Markedness theory research is in the elementary stage.Modality is a focus and difficult subject in the second language education of Japanese. With the different deep-seated structural constraints of different languages, we can find Japanese and Chinese modality showing wide differences in form, syntactic structure, X semantic and other aspects. It is the wide differences that make Chinese native speaker's study of Japanese rather difficult. Furthermore, the cognitive processes and cognitive mechanisms between Japanese and Chinese native speakers in the modal acquisition process are different, which results in Chinese negative transfer in Japanese learning. So Japanese modality teaching requires for effective teaching strategies for psychological mechanisms of cognitive differences between Japanese and Chinese in China.Chapter X summarizes the contents of this dissertation, and points out the inadequacies and prospects for future research.