The Study Of Information Structure Of The Verb-copying Sentence

Verb-copying sentence is a special type of construction in Chinese, and studying from the point of view of information structure will make us understand Verb-copying sentence more accurately and thoroughly.The paper are divided into nine chapters, and the main part includes six chapters: ChapterⅢis theoretical premise; ChapterⅣ,Ⅴ,ⅥandⅦdiscuss the internal structure of information from different perspectives; ChapterⅧis mainly on the discourse information of Verb-copying sentence.Now the main points of every chapter will be introduced as following:ChapterⅠis introduction, which mainly includes the research subjects, scope, value and research methods, corpus sources, etc.ChapterⅡis the summary of study of verb-copying sentence in previous study, which is composed of three parts: (1) mainland scholars' research; (2) overseas scholars' research; (3) the study of information structure of verb-copying sentence.ChapterⅢis the theoretical premise on information structure study, discussing the meaning of information structure, introducing the main history of the information structure study, and establishing content of it. In this paper, the author will mainly accept the theory of information structure of Lambrecht's (1994).ChapterⅣdiscusses the cognitive status of objects of verb-copying sentence. The objects include mainly noun morphemes, null nouns and personal pronouns, which are basically non-referential or identifiable, and express unimportant information. The pairs between the unmarked form, non-referentiality and identifiability, and unimportant informational status are natural.ChapterⅤand ChapterⅥdiscuss the focus structure of verb-copying sentence. There are two types of focus structure of verb-copying sentence: (1) VP1 is the presupposition, and VP2 is the focus, i.e. presupposition- focus structure; (2) VP1 is the focus, and VP2 is the presupposition, i.e. focus - presupposition structure. The former is unmarked, and the latter is marked . The paper mainly discusses the unmarked focus structure.ChapterⅤis about the presupposition of verb-copying sentence. The present author considers verb-copying sentence as one kind of presuppositional triggers, which triggers VP1 as presupposition. This is an important feature of verb-copying sentence, and can explain many phenomena, such as that VP1 mainly express old information, and that VP1 can also express new information.ChapterⅥis about the focus of verb-copying sentence. The present author tries to verify that VP2 is the focus from various perspectives: deletion, topicalization, question, Parallel, whether it controlled by "Shi" (是), whether it controlled by the auxiliaries, and whether it controlled by negative words, whether it the deepest embedded components, and so on. This chapter also discusses the situation that VP1 acts as a focus, and its severe restrictions. Finally, many kinds of dual focuses constructions in the literature are analyzed, and the present author pointes out that they are very marked constructions, and occurs less frequently in everyday life. Verb-copying sentence is not dual focuses construction, the author conforms.ChapterⅦdiscusses the relationship between insertable elements and information structure of verb-copying structure. Insertable elements can be divided into two categories: (1) semantic elements; (2) pragmatic elements. The paper focuses on the latter.Insertable elements and the information structure of verb-copying sentence are closely linked. First, Insertable elements reflect the information structure of verb-copying sentence. The vast majority of the insertable elements, which are to express emphatic or modal meanings, can be seen as focus sensitive operators, which show that VP2 is the focus. Secondly, the information structure of verb-copying sentence determines the actual meaning or use of polysemic elements, i.e., when these elements are inserted between VP1 and VP2, they often express the meaning of emphasis.ChapterⅧis about discourse information of verb-copying sentence, which was paid little attention to before. The present author tries to discuss the discourse information mainly from the perspective of transitivity, because the two are closely related: foreground relates high transitivity, and background relates low transitivity. To enable conclusion to be more reliable, the paper contrast verb-copying sentence with Ba(把) construction and Bei(被) construction. The result shows that verb-copying sentence is low in transitivity, and mainly in background.ChapterⅨ, conclusion, is mainly on the content and the main arguments of the paper. The present author also shows the remaining deficiencies of the paper and some problems worthy of more in-depth research.