Study On Syntactic Distribution Of "Qian' Ou" Monosyllabic Word In Mandarin

This thesis discusses a type of monosyllabic word which has to be used in Disyllabic Template in Mandarin Chinese based on the theory of prosodic syntax. These mono-words come from Ancient written Chinese(i.e.Wenyan/WY) and are only used in formal language in Mandarin(or Written Mandarin) nowadays.These words are named as "Qian'Ou" Monosyllabic word/QO-Wd,in Chinese version and "Disyllabe-templated Mono-Word"/DT-Md in English version.The type of these mono-words is regarded as a kind of"bounded morphemes" by Chinese structuralists before;but turns into "syntax-free and prosody-bounded" from a prosodic syntactic point of view(冯胜利2006:2).By "syntax-free",it means that this type of monosyllabic words has the same syntactic function as the other "normal" mono-words do;by "prosody-bounded",it means wherever this mono-word appears in syntactic structure,it has to be used in disyllabic template in practice.This study of DT-Mds deals with three main aspects:First,we analyzed the properties of DT-Mds in Mandarin.Not only can a DT-Md in Mandarin apposes with another lexical part to form a word(like "xue-xiao"("study-school" means "school")),but also become a node in syntactic structure independently(like "zai-xiao"("in school")) or combine with a functional word(such as a determiner)(like "ben-xiao"(this school)) only if all the operations are handled in a disyllabic template.This fact shows that DT-Mds are actually syntax-free,but each collocation of such word has to be disyllabic,restricted by the Mandarin Prosodic Rules.Whereby,we propose a new method to differentiate monosyllabic word from monosyllabic morpheme in Mandarin based on the work of Pollock(1989:365)——Functional Word Combination Rule/FWCR,arguing that:if A or B(or both) in combination of AB is a functional word,the process of this AB combination is in syntax.Thus either A or B is a lexical word,instead of a morpheme. Secondly,We built a DT-Wd corpus and made a statistic analysis of its syntactic distribution to find out the mechanism behind.Based on the the formal characteristics of "Lihe word"(another special disyllabic VO type structure in Mandarin),we found another important effect of nuclear stress(NS),that is NS has the effect on syntactic structure to separate or conglutinate the combination of words within the NS domain, resulting the NS domain a expanding trend inside.This effect of NS is not only the motivation of the word formation/WF of a kind of syntactic compound in Mandarin (with five type:VR%V/VO%V/AdvV%V/VP%V/MN%/N),but also makes the DT-Mds' distribution regular:the 4 main positions are Adv,V,N and M,all of which are inside NS domain,conglutinated by NS power.Last,we discussed the signification of DT-Wd study to Universal Grammar/UG and what it reveals of properties of Mandarin.The DT-Md Study manifests that written Mandarin is an independent system different from the spoken Mandarin and the classical language of the past.Its unique property can be characterized in terms of a prosodic grammar.Written and Spoken languages are equally important for Chinese grammarians.In this thesis,we also mentioned five types of syntactic compounds which are a mandarin-specific compound,apposed with Japanese post-syntactic compounds (Shibatani and Kagayama 1998) and Hebrew construct state nominals(Borer 1988), all of which are arguing to be formed in syntax.The special points in Mandarin syntactic compounds are that the motivation of the word formation comes from prosodic components and the factors that differentiate syntactic compounds from the same-type phrases are prosodic in nature also.This conclusion has an important significant to Universal grammar in morph-syntax study.