Reciprocal Constructions In Chinese

Although some scholars have noticed early that there are special strategies to encode reciprocal meaning in Chinese, there is still no agreed understanding for reciprocal meaning and no systematic research for reciprocal construction because of the fuzzy boundary of reciprocal category. Through the investigation of natural data, we find there are three main reciprocal constructions, say, implicit lexical reciprocal constructions, explicit lexical reciprocal constructions as well as syntactic structure reciprocal constructions. This dissertation, by adopting some basic concepts and relevant theories in Point of View Theory and Cognitive Grammar, discusses the realization of these three kinds of constructions from the syntactical facet, semantic facet and pragmatic facet. The co-occurrence and co-exclusion of different components to encode reciprocal meaning are also mentioned. We take Chinese language as our main research object, and also investigate many other languages for contrastive purposes. This is a systematic research on reciprocal constructions in Chinese with the aim of further describing and explaining the relevant linguistic phenomenon. This dissertation is composed of seven chapters:Chapter 1 introduces the study object, significance of this research, content of this research, theoretical background, methods employed as well as the data resources.Chapter 2 reviews the previous studies on reciprocal constructions, and introduces different types of reciprocal meaning. We give the working definition of "reciprocal relation", "reciprocal meaning" and "reciprocal construction" and also distinguish "reciprocity" with "sociativity" and "symmetry" in this chapter.Chapter 3, implicit lexical reciprocal constructions, investigates reciprocal nouns, reciprocal verbs and reciprocal adjectives. The reciprocal meaning of implicit reciprocal words is extracted from their core semantic features. That is to say, the reciprocal meaning of these words is implicit. Different words can enter different structure, and in different structures, the hierarchy of symmetric relationship between different arguments is different. And the difference is caused by the pragmatic and cognitive factors.Chapter 4, explicit lexical reciprocal constructions, analyzes reciprocal pronouns and reciprocal adverbs. For reciprocal pronouns and reciprocal adverbs, reciprocal meaning is their core meaning. That is to say, except the reciprocal meaning there is no or little other meaning for these two types of words. So, for reciprocal pronouns and reciprocal adverbs, their reciprocal meaning is explicit. Reciprocal pronouns refers to "bi ci(彼此)”Reciprocal adverbs are composed of "xiang hu(相�')”,"hu xiang (�'相)”,"xiang(相)”,"hu(�')”In Mandarin Chinese, most of "xiang(相)”and "hu(�')”appear as morphemes, however they are used as adverbs in ancient Chinese. For this research involves diachronic survey, we discuss "xiang(相)’’and "hu(�')”in this chapter for the purpose of comparison. In this chapter, we investigate the lexicalization motivation of "bi ci (彼此)”,"xiang hu (相�')”and "hu xiang(�'相)”,as well as their grammatical change caused by their mutual semantic contamination. We also survey the motivation of the incorporation of "xiang(相)”and "hu(�')”with the verbs they modify. The syntactical and semantic representations of reciprocal pronouns and reciprocal adverbs in ancient Chinese and Mandarin Chinese are also mentioned.Chapter 5, the syntactic structure reciprocal constructions, we analyze clausal constructions, "Zhang San loves Li Si, and Li Si loves Zhang San (张三爱李四,李四也爱张三)”,for example. And we also discuss constructions like "ni kan kan wo, wo kan kan ni (你看看我,我看看你)”,"shui ye bu li shui(谁也不理谁)”,’tui lai tui qu(推来推去)”,"dou···dui fang(都……对方)”,here. We investigate the iconicity of clausal constructions as well as arbitrary-reference function of pronouns in the constructions like "ni kan kan wo, wo kan kan ni (你看看我,我看看你)”,"shui ye bu li shui (谁也不理谁)”The pragmatic ang cognitive motivation for the emergence of reciprocal meaning in "W lai W qu (W 来 W 去)" construction is also mentioned. We also discuss the ambiguity of "dou···dui fang(都……对方)”and the realization of reciprocal meaning in "N non-reciprocal verb N(N(非相�')VN)".Chapter 6 concentrates on the co-occurrence and co-exclusion of different types of reciprocal constructions. According to our survey, the constraint factors for co-occurance or co-exclusion include genre, prosody, the requirement for semantic clarity, as well as the number of participants in reciprocal events.Chapter 7 presents a generalization of the main research findings of the dissertation, and points out the prospects for future research.