The Modern Chinese Word Order Cognitive Mechanisms To Explore

Besides the introduction and conclusion part, this dissertation is divided into five chapters.In the introduction part, it illustrates the discrepancies in the definitions and understandings of the term "word order" among researchers in Chinese. The conclusion part sums up the gist of the whole dissertation and forwards some problems to be further considered.Chapter one presents a general review of the previous studies of Chinese word order. The study has a long history . And the outcome of the studies mainly concentrates on the following aspects: First, the description of Chinese word order phenomenon. Such as, the analysis of "word" and "order" in Ma's, the difference between word types, the relationship of word order, etc.. Send, discussing the characters of Chinese word order by placing it in the world language system. Third, a three-plane word order: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic which advanced the differences of word order among the three planes above. It helps people understand the word order deeply and promotes the development of Chinese word order study. Forth, the micro-study of word order, scholars have probed into many language phenomenon from different angles ,for example: the transposal phenomenon in oral Chinese, especially in Modern Chinese. However, these studies usually put stress on the order of syntactic components, but not on semantic components and pragmatic components.Chapter two introduces two features of the Chinese word order: layers and flexibility. Word order needs to be taken into consideration in the grammatical levels as word, phrase, sentence and sentence group, as there are some fixed components in them, such as suffixes, function words, which cannot move freely. Although there is, theoretically, a possibility of movement in some components, those syntactic ones co-occurring with them will constrain their movement. There are, certainly, some words with the same morpheme but different order in word form. Change of the order of their inner morphemes will accordingly bring about changes in their part of speech, meaning and context of usage. In this sense, as far as the abstract syntactic structure is concerned, word order is featured by fixation, and viewed from the concrete aspect, it has some flexibility.Chapter three, the operating mechanism of Chinese word order. Modern Chinese word order is restricted by many factors, such as: the verb's types and people's cognitive mechanism. After a deep research into the operating mechanism of the Chinese word order from syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and cognitive angles, scholars consider the Chinese word order is greatly affected by such epistemological principles as the principle of time order, the principle of semantic affinity, and is related with part of speech in linear sequence and argument in valent words. But, all of these mechanism above are not isolated, but as a whole to influence the order.Chapter four discusses the word order of prepositional phrase and its constraining factors. During the process of its diachronic development, prepositional phrase has the tendency to be positioned to the back of verb to the front. This process is closely connected with the formation of indicative supplemental construction, and loosely with the wide use of localizers.Prepositional phrases in modern Chinese are basically functioned as adverbial. According to the position they can occupy, they are divided into three types: fixed-position prepositional phrase, non-fixed-position prepositional phrase, and sub-fixed-position prepositional phrase. Fixed-position prepositional phrase can only appear in the front of the sentence (or before the subject) or in the middle of the sentence (or after the subject). Generally, they cannot move. The prepositional phrases headed by"至于","把","被"are of this group. Non-fixed-position prepositional phrase can appear in the front or middle of the sentence. Their position is quite elastic. Sub-fixed-position prepositional phrase generally appears in the middle of the sentence. When moved to the front of the sentence, they should be under some constraints.The order of modern Chinese prepositional phrase, on the one hand, is subject to semantic constraints, for instance, the semantic relation between the object of the prepositional phrase and the verb, and on the other, syntactic constraints, such as the type and complexity of the predicates it modifies. What's more, pragmatic factors such as the topic directing function, focus-highlighting function, and textual function also constrain the formation of prepositional phrase.Chapter five explores the constraining factors of the order of object and complement in modern Chinese. Although the indicative supplemental structure emerged in the middle ancient Chinese, the process of its actual grammaticalization lasted to the Qing dynasty. The order of object and complement differs greatly between modern Chinese and ancient Chinese, which is concerned with many factors. Complement in modern Chinese has many types, and co-occurrence of different complements and objects has some distinction. Generally, complement of state and complement of degree cannot co-occur with object, while complement of result and complement of direction can, but the order of co-occurrence is not necessarily the same. The former can only take the pattern of "Verb+Complement+Object", while the latter can take many more patterns. The semantic types of complement, the structure of object and directionality of object are all important factors that determine the order of object and complement.