A Grounding Approach To Chinese Generics

Generics(or generic sentences),constituted by generic NPs and individual-level predicates,evoke the intensional property of a category by making factual judgements or value judgements,and are characterized by intensionality,non-individuality,fictivity and exception-tolerance.There have been a number of studies on generics from semantic,pragmatic and cognitive approaches in terms of syntactic and semantic features of generics.Some of these approaches describe the semantic features of generics,some attribute the features of generics to unpredictably changing contexts,and some regard generics as an expression of human generalization capability.As a linguistic phenomenon as well as an expression of primitive generalization,generics are supposed to be studied in a way of combining linguistic features with cognitive motivation behind it.This research focuses on Chinese generics.Few studies discuss generic NPs and individual-level predicates of Chinese generics which are not formally marked compared with English generics.The grounding theory attaches great importance to the relation among the physical world,the linguistic world and the cognitive world,and thus is more capable of revealing the kind-denoting property of generic NP,the generalizing property of individual-level predicates in Chinese,and the generalizing capability behind the generics.Every language has its own grounding system and the grounding study of Chinese generics is a new topic.This research discusses the following issues from the grounding perspective:(1)What are the syntactic and semantic features of Chinese generics?(2)How are Chinese generics grounded? To be more specific,in which ways are Chinese generic NPs and generic sentences grounded?What is the way for the grounding of tautology “NP jiushi NP” as a variant of Chinese generics?(3)How does discourse place constraints on the grounding of Chinese generics?The present research is a qualitative study with the assistance of non-closed data from CCL(Center for Chinese Linguistics,PKU),BCC(BLCU Corpus Center)and introspective ones.The conclusions are as follow:First,Chinese generics are syntactically characterized by generic nominals and individual-level predicates.There are four patterns in generic nominal,namely,“bare noun”,“one-CL NP”,“zhe/ge+NP”,“singular personal pronoun +one CL-NP”.These patterns derive the generic meaning from the individual-level predicates.Individual-level predicates of Chinese generics are timeless,which indicates an open time concept,corresponding to no specific time point.Fictive grounds are created in a timeless situation to reflect the time of generics.Based on the capabilities and attributes of a class,generics provide predictions and judgments with potency of different kinds and degrees.Second,the grounding of Chinese generics falls into two levels--the grounding of generic NPs and the grounding of generic clauses.The four generic nominal patterns are grounded in three ways: “Bare NP” is grounded in a covert way,“one-CL NP” and “zhe/ge+NP” are grounded in a quasi-overt way,and “singular personal pronoun +one-CL NP” is grounded in a quasi-intrinsic way.In clausal grounding,Chinese generics are grounded in fictive grounds with timeless situations and generic modality,which makes the relation and property identified by the speaker and hearer.The tautology “NP jiushi NP” is analyzed as a kind of idiosyncratic generics,in which NP1 serves as the generic nominal,and NP2 in nature expresses a property of the “CLASS FOR PROPERTY” metonymy.NP1 covertly singles out a fictive instance as the referent.The expression “jiushi” implicates the timeless feature and evaluative modality.NP2,as a property of a category,works along with “jiushi” to constitute the individual-level of this pattern and create fictive property grounds.Third,the ongoing discourse information provides more grounds.There may exist some relations between the old grounds and the new ones: ground consistency,ground compatibility and ground replacement.These relations place constraints on the grounding of generic sentences,leading to genericity conservation,referential vagueness and genericity cancellation.The present study attempts to employ the grounding theory to probe into Chinese generics.It is of the following theoretical and practical significance: Firstly,the dissertation provides a new perspective to the study of necessity and means of the grounding of Chinese generics.Secondly,it puts forward two modes of grounding for Chinese generics: “quasi-overt grounding” and “quasi-intrinsic grounding”.This study has the potential to promote the development of grounding theory based on Chinese language.Lastly,the tautology “NP jiushi NP” is studied in the framework of generics.By revealing different semantic types of tautology,this study may lead to more interesting research on tautology from a new perspective.