Shi And Several Related Issues

The main aim of this dissertation focuses on the nature of Shi and several syntactic questions about Shi.Chapter I:It’s about how the present studies did on the issue and how I plan the whole structure in the dissertation.Chapter II:It is the basis part of the dissertation, which aims to find out if Shi is a declarative verb or a semantically meaningless stressing sign. From the semantic part, the syntactic representation from the occurrence of Shi and three difference kinds of modality verbs leads to show what Shi does mean. And about the syntactic part, this dissertation fixes the nature of Shi on declarative verb. The thought could solve some unaccountable problems, such as the syntactic limits of Shi and so-called "double focuses diploma" interrogative sentences, which both interrogative pronoun and shi are used.Chapter Ⅲ, Ⅳ&Ⅴ:Deal with shi and the lexical category. In modern Chinese, almost each VP could be the complement of the verb Shi. On the point, nouns and verbs present the undoubted consistency. No matter which syntactic part the unmarked verbs or verb phrases are on, subject or object, it never lose the most important categorical feature of verbs that verb could be modified by the adverbs. After debating on the nominalization research or clause projection analysis of the VPs which are on the subject or object position, the new conclusion is it is practical that the standard of how to deal with lexical category in Chinese should be from pragmatic view more than syntactic one. Verb is one of subcategory of Noun in Chinese, since the verbs could be the reference and the statement when the nouns could be the reference only.Chapter VI:Sentences which like wo shi niurou mian can mean "I have an order for beef noodles" rather than "I am the beef noodle literally". To explain this kind of copular construction with zero subject and deferred reference meets with many difficulties. Instead of these resolutions, we assert that there is no difference between classical copular constructions and the ones like that mentioned above. These copular constructions like wo shi niurou mian belong to a sentence pattern with its own constructional meaning of "subjective identity". Since the copulas in these sentences mean to carry the subjective connotation, the different copulas from various languages will be the key of to or not to set up the kind of copular construction with meaning of "subjective identity".Chapter Ⅶ:Another discussion about the subjective feature of Shi will be presented in the part. In Chinese, several hypothetical conjunctions consist of morpheme Shi. Based on the evidences from typology research, other kinds’studies of hypothetical conjunctions with difference resources, it finds out that the reason why there are yaoshi, jiushi or ruoshi with the morpheme Shi is the "subjective identity" meaning of Shi.Chapter Ⅷ:Extends the issue to sentence-final particle le2(了2) in Mandarin. The concepts of "assertion" and "existence" brought by shi and you(有) are very basic in languages. Many language elements are divided into two basic parts by these concepts. This study to contrast sentence-final particle le2and de (的) ends to a conclusion that le2is related to "assertion" as a modality mood particle just like de almost does.Chapter Ⅸ:Summarizes all the works and sketches the future study.