A Study On The Priority Sequences Of Multiple-attributive Phrases In Modern Chinese

The thesis focuses the two issues from the angles of the priority sequence and by the research method of the quantitative analysis: one is the emergence and ellipsis rules of "de", and the other is the word order of multiple-attributive. Viewed from the surface, the two isssues are isolate, but they are linked on the semantic level. The thesis conducts a comprehensive survey of the two issues and links them by the semantic types of attributives. The thesis takes the close statistic data as a basis of discussing the issues. The thesis conducts a tendency study on the basis of diversity and tries to make enough explanation as well as enough observation and enough description. The thesis takes all the advantages of different scholars without a certain theory background. In the stage of observation and description, the author mainly utilizes the research mathods of the traditional language, simultaneouely, uses the theory of typology for reference, while in the stage of explanation, the author mainly adopts some theories and viewpoints of cognition linguistics and functional linguistics.The thesis focuses on the following issues.Chapter one introduces the current situations of the relative question, the research thoughts and the methods of the study, the choices and the management methods of the corpus, and points out the problems in the predecessors' researches from which the thesis takes a lesson .Chapter two investigates the use frequency of the phrases in modern Chinese, through which the position of attibutive-head phrases are ascertained. The grammar circle has well solved the questions of character frequency and word frequency, but how is the question of the phrase frequency solved? What types of phrases are the most common ones seems not to be discussed at present, which is the issue that the chapter discusses. Firstly, a 100,000 corpus is builed up containing 5 kinds of styles, takes and the corpus as a research object, separates all of the phrases contained in the corpus by manual way, then divides them into 15 kinds of common structural types and conducts statistics of their frequency. At last, the study gains a comprehensive chart of modern Chinese phrase use frequency on the basis of the statistic data, from which the positions of attibutive-head phrases are observed. The thesis finds that modifier-head phrases, predicate-object phrases, adverbial-head phrases and subject-predicate phrases take the main advantage of the priority sequence to stand in the first four places (the others' use frequencies are lower) , and attibutive-head phrases stands in the first place taking the slight advantage.Chapter three conducts a dynamic statistics of the number of multiple attributives, the semantic types of attributives, the use frequency of "de" still on the basis of the 100, 000 corpus in order to observe the distribution situations of every item of multiple-attibutive phrases from multiple angles. The results are that there is a great disparity in the use frequency of two-attibutive phrases, three-attributive phrases and four-attributive phrases. The entire distribution tendenc is: two-attibutive phrases (82.38%) > three-attributive phrases (14.38%) >four-attibutive phrases and the above four-attibutive (3.04%) ("> "means "be prior to").Among all the semantic types of attrihutive-head phrases, the use frequency of the semantics with possesion, state and property is the highest, and it possesses no variations in styles.The use frequency of "de" in written style obviously is higher than in spoken style. The semantic types of attrubutives is the research emphasis of this chapter, and also the main clue across the whole thesis. Before conducting the statistics of the semantic types of attributives, the thesis attenpts to establish a rather strict semantic system based on the mutual verification between the forms and the meanings, and offer the conceptions of three scopes (that is the possession scope, state scope and property scope), whose intention is building up a theoretical basis for studying the emergence and ellipsis rules of "de" and word order of multiple attributives in the next stage.Chapter four discusses entirely the emergence and ellipsis rules of "de" from the multiple angles of the number of the attributives, the number of "de", the semantic types, the syntactic positions and the commonly used attributive markers. The main results are: (1) in art style, no matter how long an attibutive is, the best number of using "de" is 1, the number of using "de" can rise to 2 with the increase of the number of attibutives, but no more than 3. (2)The distribution of "de" in the three scopes is extremely unbalanced, whose entire tendency is heavy in the middle and light at the two ends, and appears to be: possession scope < state scope > property scope("< "means the use frequency of "de"is lower than; "> "means the use frequency is higher than.)The author concluds the emergence and ellipsis rules of "de" of multiple-attributive phrases in modern Chinese, which is that in a noun phrase, the nearer an attributive is to the middle scope, the easier it carryies "de"; the nearer an attributive is to the two ends, the easier it elides "de". (3) In the same sentence, the bigger the limited degree of a syntactic position is, the smaller the capacity between it and "de" is. The the smaller the limited degree of a syntactic position is, the bigger the capacity between it and "de" is. (4) Viewed from the degree of semantic grammarlization, the higher the grammarlization degree of a commonly used marker is, the more easily the nonspecificly used attributive marker "de" elides. Viewed from the entirement of a grammatical structure, the commonly used attributive marker in the possession structure is even easier to cause the ellipsis of the nonspecificly used attrbutive marker "de" than in the relative clause.Chapter five examines anew the question of word order of multiple attributives from the angle of priority sequence, conducts firstly an entire investigation of the drift phenomenon of an attributive and establishes a sequence of prior word order of modern Chinese multiple attributives entirely on the basis of the semantic types, taking the data as a prop. The word order sequence is: possession > time> location > source/direction > concern > deixis > quantity > state > comparison > function > connotation >property("> "means "be prior to). The author explains the the priority sequence by "the implicational universals of single-way word order", puts forword the concepts of "drift in the scope", "drift across scopes",etc. , and conducts cognitive explainations of the drift of attributive phenomenon by the two pairs terms of "natural word order" and " prominent word order", "natural focus" and "comparative focus" .As well, the author inspects the impact of multiple attributives on the ellipsis of "de", taking the "VP" attributives' drift forwords and state adjective attributives' drift forwords as examples.Chapter six inspecs the styles' impact on the use frequency of modern Chinese phrases, the emergence and ellipsis rules of "de" in a multi-attributive phrase and the word order. There are two steps in the part. Firstly, the thesis conducts statistics of the use frequency of phrases in different styles in 10,0000 corpus, then verifies and corrects the results in chapter two on the basis of the use frequency above.Secondly, taking the press style as an example, the author conducts the comparative investigation of the emergence and ellipsis rules of "de" and the wod orders of multiple attibutives, reveals the differences between the emergence and ellipsis rules of "de" snd the wod orders of multiple attibutives existing in art style and press style, thus mends the shortness of the study in a single style.Chapter seven summarizes the conclusions, the significance of the thesis, the originalities, the insufficiences and the research direction in the future.