A Comparative Study Of The Meanings Between Chinese And Russian Speech Act Verbs

Verbs are one of the most important components in language. Meaning permeates into every aspect of language including lexicology, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics. Therefore, a multi-dimensional integrated description of verb meanings is investigated in this dissertation. By a comparative study of the meanings of specific verb category--speech act verbs, the similarities and dissimilarities of the lexical meanings, grammatical meanings and pragmatic meanings of the Chinese and Russian verbs are explored. Hence, an academic and practical value is prospected.This dissertation includes four chapters. Chapter one is the semantic classification of speech act verbs. An overview of the semantic classification of general verbs and speech act verbs is described, and a further classification of speech act verbs is defined by means of semantic field theory and sememe analysis theory which includes Q-As, interactive, imperative, emotional, evaluative and declarative, etc. Chapter two is the analysis of the sememe analysis of Russian speech act verbs. The sememe analysis models of the speech act verbs are constructed here, and which proves the feasibility of the classification of the six sub-categories of the speech act verbs. And also the sememe analysis structures are constructed by analyzing the meanings of the verbs in the six sub-categories of Chinese and Russian speech act verbs one by one. And finally 39 categories of speech act verbs are further classified according to the typical sememe characteristics of 718 Chinese and 367 Russian speech act verbs. Chapter three is about the valency study of Russian speech act verbs. Our valency view is built up based on the detailed overview of the valency grammar theory that speech act verbs are trivalent verbs. A further valency study includes the semantic choices of the three valence components and the construction of the syntactic valence models and also the similarities and dissimilarities of the surface structures reflected by the deep meanings. Chapter four is the description of Chinese and Russian speech act verbs and their expressions. Beginning with the speech act theory, the intention and effect of speech act verbs are explored, and the corresponding classifications are put forward. From a further analysis of how to express"attempt"and"success"in conative functional semantic field, the expression means of how to express"success"in Chinese and Russian speech act verbs are induced and the differences of the two core expression means are pointed out by a comparative study.As a fundamental research fruit as to a comparative study of Russian and Chinese, this dissertation has given a further study of Chinese and Russian speech act verbs and can hopefully provide a reference for bilingual lexicography, language translation, language teaching, and corpora building, etc.