Affix, Clitic And The Grammar System Of Modern Chinese

As important functional elements in human language, affixes and clitics manifest linguistic rules in different fields (such as morphology or syntax) respectively. Both of them have to be attached to other elements and therefore generate specific grammatical meanings as far as proper elements are concerned. Compared with affixes, clitics, which are between lexical words and affixes, are more special in terms of phonology, syntax and morphology.Based on Xu Jie’s research (2012), the present dissertation makes an overall observation and an in-depth discussion on the status and functions of affixes and clitics which are independent on each other in modern Chinese grammar. Generally speaking, the functions of affixes in modern Chinese is derivational rather than inflectional. Moreover, there are only a few derivational affixes which are poor in function and scarcely used. However, there are abundant clitics in modern Chinese which are rich in function and frequently used. The affixes and clitics system of modern Chinese with the essential feature "fewer affixes and more clitics"(Xu Jie (2012)) exerts great and everlasting influences on the whole grammatical system, including its morphology, syntax and the morphology-syntax interface. Actually, the traditionally recognized characteristics in Chinese grammar can be explained by the functions of affixes and clitics. Fundamentally speaking, it is the feature of Chinese morpheme that decides the "fewer affixes and more clitics" feature of Chinese language. The special phonetic feature and Chinese character confine the features of affixes and clitics, and it also makes it more possible for Chinese to yield more clitics and fewer affixes. To sum up, it is the feature of Chinese morpheme that fundamentally decides the characteristics of Chinese grammar. Precisely speaking, it is the phonetic feature of Chinese morpheme that fundamentally decides the characteristics of Chinese grammar.The implication of the argument that the feature of Chinese morpheme fundamentally decides the characteristics of Chinese grammar lies in another fact that the grammatical features of synthetic languages, which take abundant affixes as grammatical means such as English, are also fundamentally decided by the phonetic feature of their morphemes. Therefore, the differences between languages are most probably the differences between sound systems. In other words, all the morphological differences at lexical level and syntactic level could be derived from phonetic differences. It is apparently a further development of generative linguists’conclusion that the differences between languages lie at lexical level. It accepts the view of language advocated by Chomsky and other generative grammarians and agrees that human brain has a set of commonly shared syntactic operation systems by nature.