On Expression Of Interchange Between Quantity Subcategories In Modern Chinese

Topics about the quantity category have been one of the focuses in the academia of Chinese grammar for years. So more and more essays and books talk about this issue and terms related to quantity emerge in endlessly. But there are at least two problems left unsolved and need more efforts. One is to present a relatively clear and widely accepted definition of QUANTITY, and the other is to probe into the system of the quantity category and the relations between its subcategories.This dissertation focuses on the expression of interchange between quantity subcategories in modern Chinese. As the first step, a system of quantity is set up, and then the interchange of quantity subcategories is explored from syntactic view by some cases. Hence some phenomena in Mandarin Chinese can be given a new explanation by this work.The dissertation is composed of six chapters besides a preface and an epilog. The foregoing five chapters deals with quantity interchange from the point of view of syntagmatic relations (ie. in syntactic constructions), in which chapter 1 to 4 talk about interchange between quantity types and chapter 5 interchange between quantity values. And the last one deals with that from paradigmatic-relation's view, ie. change of quantity expressed by one same form in different syntactic slot.The preface firstly presents a brief introduction of category theory and the quantity category, then gives a detailed and critical review of researches on quantity category up to present. And then it explains the theories and approaches taken and corpus used in the dissertation.Chapter one mainly aims to set up a system of quantity category, which is divided into two subsystems: quantity type subsystem and quantity value subsystem. The former is further divided into basic and derived types, while the latter includes large or small, bound, sequence and proportion of quantity. As for basic quantity types, quantities of substance, action and property are the three quantity type of carriers, which correspond to nouns, verbs and adjectives or adverbials respectively.Chapter two deals with interchange between the quantity of substance and that of action. In Chinese, the measure word "ge" express the unit of substance and functions as a marker of substance quantity, and the verbal-measure word the unit of action and markers of action quantity. And there are constructions such as "V+L_DP+N"(L_DP stands for verbal measure word phrase) and "V+(yi)ge+VP", where the usages of both the L_DP and the word ge are different from their typical function and many "L_DP+N" and "ge+VP" cases are asyntactic without an proper verb put ahead. Nevertheless they can be explicable if considered from the view of Construction Grammar, which usually take three major constituents as one construction, and interchange of quantity subcategories. And there are interchange between the quantity of substance and that of action in these two constructions.Chapter three proposes that there are types interchanges of the quantity of substance, action and that of property in constructions "V+(yi)ge+AP" and "Adv[degree]+V+ L_DP/ L_NP" (L_NP stands for substance measure word phrase). The fourth chapter is to explain the interchange between temporal quantity and substance quantity by the case "V+(le)+T+(de)+NP", in witch T means a duration phrase.Chapter five focus on change of values of a quantity. In this chapter, large or small of a quantity is discussed by the construction of "yue A yue B" while proportion of values by the proportion construction (also called "double amount construction").The last chapter, chapter six, is devoted to the influence of syntactic slots on the quantity forms. Quantity meanings expressed by both the basic forms and duplicated forms of nouns, verbs and adjectives can change when they are placed in different syntactic slots.The dissertation ends with a brief summary and some topics to be explored.