A Research On Temporal Words In Contemporary Chinese

Based on the grammatical functions, the words denoting time in contemporary Chinese are divided into temporal nouns, temporal adverbs and temporal words. Through careful study, temporal words are classified as a distinctive word class in Contemporary Chinese lexicon system in this paper. Then, a thorough study of the connotation, scope, semantic features, and grammatical features and function of Chinese temporal words is made. Including the Introduction, there are six parts in this paper.In the Introduction, the emergence of the notion of time and the ways of expressing time in language are mainly discussed. Meanwhile, a brief retrospection of the previous studies on temporal expressions is made.In chapter one, through the retrospection and discussion of the criteria of word classification, and the previous achievements made by scholars, some criteria of determining Chinese temporal words are established. Then, based on the criteria the scope of the Chinese temporal words is made clear after a careful study of Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese. Finally, a brief discussion is made about the grammatical functions of the Chinese temporal words.In chapter two, a careful discussion is made about the grammatical features of Chinese temporal words when they serve as subject, object, attribute, adverbial or complement in a clause. At the same time, the combinations of "Pre. + Temporal word " and "time + space", as well as their grammatical and semantic features are studied.In chapter three, the semantic features of Chinese temporal words and their syntactic manifestation are discussed. The major semantic feature of Chinese temporal words is their vagueness in meaning, which is demonstrated in the vagueness of boundary and vagueness of referent. In turn, the semantic feature of the words will exert influence on their grammatical functions. Then, a contrastive study is made of several groups of common synonymous Chinese temporal words.In chapter four, cross-language proof that it is proper to classify Chinese temporal words into an instinctive word class has been found after the investigation into about 100 languages. Then, a typological study is made of the word order of the temporal adverbial for predicate and the predicate verb. Through the study, an implicational universal is discovered, i.e. if a language has object before predicate verb, then it has temporal adverbial for predicate before predicate verb. Based on this implicational universal relevant dominant order and harmonious order are discovered, too.In chapter five a conclusion of the whole paper is made, and some relevant questions for further consideration are raised.