Studies On Modern Chinese Patient-subject Clause

Patient-subject clause is a very special and important construction in modern Chinese and has drawn the attention of many scholars. There is quite a number of articles published in this field. However, there are still many gaps to fill, such as its demarcation, classification, gradable typicaltiy, semantic function, discourse function and syntactic realis and irrealis characteristics. This study focuses on NPpatient+VP clause and compares it to NPpatient+NPagent+VP and NPagent+NPpatient+VP. The thesis is composed of eight parts.The introductory part mainly introduces the content, structure, methodology, source of the data and explanation of the data.Chapter one focuses on the research status of patient-subject clause and its developmental trend. It generalizes the studies on patient-subject clause and points out the achievements made in this field and the disputes and causes and puts forward the research gap and some research questions for further study.Chapter two focuses on the demarcation and classification of patient-subject clause. Starting from the question of “the construction patterns of Chinese abstract verbs” raised by Lu Jianming and Shen Yang(2004), it deduces the construction of patient-subject clause as(a) NPpatient+VP,(b) NPpatient +NPagent+VP,(c) NPagent+NPpatient+VP and such constructions must satisfy two semantic conditions:(1)moved NPpateint is still the necessary argument of the verb, its semantic role remains the same after the movement(2)preposition cannot be put in front of the NPpatient under any condition.Chapter three focuses on the typical patient-subject clause including such sentences whose subjects can be the affected, the causative and the resultative; non-typical patient-subject clause includes such sentences whose subjects are instrument, place, motivation, object while means, time, and link verb cannot get into such clause.Chapter four focuses on the syntactic and semantic functions of non-typical patient-subject clause. The instrument in non-typical patient-subject clause can be the agent subject and patient subject and there are two criteria for it: when it is used as patient subject, it cannot be in “agent+Yong” structure, or it cannot have an object. When it is used as agent subject, those two criteria does not apply to it. Either as agent subject or patient subject, the instrument has its force-transmission feature and at the same time agentive and patient features. When place is used as subject, there will not have marked directional word. It can be a place in the objective world as well as an object with passive function and hence exhibiting agentive feature. Motivation is abstract noun representing non-entity. When it is used as a subject, similar to instrument and place, it shows its reflective motivation role and patient feature. Object is affected by the governed verb and exhibits very low patient feature. But it has very obvious boundedness and definiteness.Chapter five focuses on the gradable typicality of patient-subject and provides cognitive explications. The patient feature of typical patient-subject clause shows the following cline: affected subject clause﹥caused subject clause﹥resultative subject clause; the patient feature of non-typical patient shows the following cline: instrument subject clause(specifically speaking it is instrument patient subject clause) ﹥place subject clause﹥motivation subject clause﹥object subject clause. The prominence in cognition and the semantic relevance between verb and noun are the reasons that patient can be moved in front of verb and used as subject.Chapter six focuses on the transitivity of patient-subject clause. The transitivity of “NPpatient+VP” forms a continuum. This continuum determines that the syntactic and semantic functions of NPpatient+VP are also distributed along a continuum. A low degree of Transitivity shows the more application of psychological verb, possible complement and irrealis form in the sentence and towards the low degree end, the clause will tend to be more descriptive or evaluative; a high degree of Transitivity shows more application of action verb, result complement, directional complement, temporal marker and realis form in the sentence and towards the high degree end, the clause will show more narrative fucntion. The Transitivity of “NPpatient+VP” is motivated by discourse function. High Transitivity is correlated with foregrounding and low Transitivity is correlated with backgrounding.Chapter seven focuses on realis and irrealis of patient-subject clause. The realis syntactic features of NPpatient+VP are resultative construction, tense auxiliary, temporal adverb and descriptive adverbial; the irrealis syntactic features are complex sentence, interrogative sentence, evaluative adverb, modal verb and possible complement in declarative sentence. The proportion of realis NPpatient+VP is much higher than irrealis NPpatient+VP.