A Study Of Cause-effect Sentences In Early Modern Chinese

The dissertation inquires into9parts collectively, namely the limits and development of causal conjunctions, the patterns of cause-effect sentences, the modifiers of cause clauses, the places of subjects in cause-effect sentences, the orders of cause-effect sentences, the appearance and disappearance of causal conjunctions, the semantic tendency of causal conjunctions, the differences between expositive and deductive cause-effect sentences, and the subjectivity of cause-effect sentences, and does the corresponding description and explanation, with Zutang Ji (《祖堂集》), Dunhuang Bianwen(敦煌变文)and other documents as research material, the five combination as research method, the cause-effect sentences in early modern Chinese as research object.There are roughly46causal conjunctions, including19cause conjunctions and27effect conjunctions, in early modern Chinese. These causal conjunctions, most of which haven’t evident positive and negative tendency in semantics, have3forms-one syllable, two syllables and three syllables, and3situations-having to appear, having to disappear and appearing and disappearing alternatively. From early modern Chinese to modern Chinese, these causal conjunctions had some comparatively large changes. It’s worth paying attention to one thing that in the development of causal conjunctions from early modern Chinese to modern Chinese, social factor played an important role:the wave of vernacular writings between19and20century and the proposal that spoken language should match well with written language in movement of vernacular writings on May4th,1919undoubtedly promoted this change. This change also made the whole system of causal conjunctions from asymmetric to more symmetric.If marked cause-effect sentences, the cause-effect sentences in early modern Chinese include patterns used independently and patterns used collocatively, which can be separated into cause-to-effect and effect-to-cause respectively, according to having or having no collocation between marks. Essentially, patterns used successively and patterns used parallel, which have the features in construction and semantics, are also patterns used independently and patterns used collocatively. Besides, for the cause-effect sentences in early modern Chinese, adverbs can be added before cause conjunctions to modify the connected cause clauses by them, which further convey complicated causality, especially the cause variety. For the positions of subjects in cause clauses and effect clauses in cause-effect sentences in early modern Chinese, it has3kinds, namely appearing before causal conjunctions, appearing after causal conjunctions and appearing before and after causal conjunctions simultaneously. There are diverse methods of dividing causality in early modern Chinese, but expositive and deductive causality this two-dividing method is the most reasonable, then correspondingly the cause-effect sentences in early modern Chinese comprise expositive and deductive cause-effect sentences, which both have the remarkable differences in syntax and semantics. In semantics, the essential distinction between the former expressing a sort of expositive causality and the latter expressing a sort of deductive causality is that the former only enumerates simply causes and effects to constitute causality, but the latter contains a comparatively complex cause-to-effect deductive course. That is to say, expositive causality lays stress on the final state of causality, but deductive causality lays stress on the formation process of causality. According to the narrative angles of talkers and applying or applying no some ways that can advance subjectivity, the two kinds of sentences both can be divided into4subordinate kinds:strong subjectivity, inferiorly strong subjectivity, weak subjectivity and inferiorly weak subjectivity.In a word, during the process of development of cause-effect sentences from early modern Chinese to modern Chinese, there were at least5respects having changes, i.e. the limits of causal conjunctions, the patterns of cause-effect sentences, the modifiers of cause clauses, the places of subjects in cause-effect sentences and the semantic tendency of causal conjunctions. These changes of above-mentioned5respects can be summarized in the3points:production of new grammatical forms and grammatical meanings, death of old grammatical forms and alteration of retained grammatical forms and grammatical meanings in appearing frequency or proportion. During the process of development, which nevertheless, is mainly the result of drift of Chinese itself by its interior laws, influence of Indo-European played a certain role. The characteristic of cause-effect sentences in early modern Chinese is the cause-effect sentences that have possessed embryonic form of modern Chinese, but have never been improved to completion.