A Typological Approach To Adverbial Subordinating Conjunctions In Chinese And English

As one of the three major approaches in language research,linguistic typology aims to seek some universal principles behind human languages.Traditional studies on adverbial subordinating conjunctions are mainly confined to individual languages,while typological studies pay more attention to cross-linguistical lexical types,word order tendencies and their characteristics of emergence and omission,as well as their implications on other grammatical forms.This dissertation,based on relevant theories and principles from linguistic typology,gives a thorough exploration of Adverbial Subordinating Conjunctions(“conjunctions” hereafter)in Chinese and English.It especially focuses on morphological features,semantic and syntactic functions,collocation patterns as well as word order tendencies of conjunctions,attempting to figure out the similarities and peculiarities in both languanges.Besides,some relevant motivations have been amply explored to explain and enrich the research results.Generally speaking,this dissertation mainly covers these five aspects.The concept of subordination and its coding strategies have been given a further discussion from the prospective of linguistic typology.Subordination can be typologically defined as “a situation whereby a cognitive asymmetry is established between linked state of affairs”(Cristofaro2003).This functional definition can be applicable in almost every human language and effective in typological study.Besides,this kind of asymmetry should be understood from the point of assertiveness and autonomousness,which serve as the core criteria in defining subordination.Cross-linguistically,subordination can be coded by subordinator,speical verb forms and word order.Finally,we adopt the criteria suggested by Kortmann(1998)to select proper conjunctions from Chinese and English languages as our research objectives.Inverse Relation Hypothesis is applied to testify whether,as for adverbial subordinating conjunctions in Chinese and English,the morphological features have some kind of relevance with the semantic and syntactic functions.It is revealed that the syntactic multifunctionality basically follows this hypothesis while the semantic multifunctionality does not.As for Chinese,different semantic relations are marked by different conjunctions,which means one conjunction has only one meaning.As for English,some conjunctions can convey more than two meanings.From these facts,we construct a semantic map about conjunctions and come to a conclusion that TIME is the basis and origin of other semantic relations,playing a central role in human's cognitive system.Breaking away from the traditional idea that Chinese conjunctions are prone to be omitted while English to emerge,we systematically probe into their principles and motivations in the process of omission and emergence.In fact,both Chinese and English conjunctions have three patterns in their omission and emergence,with different conditions behind them.As for the similarity,conjunctions in both languages may be omitted in normal semantic relations and syntactic structures,and must be omitted or must emerge in abnormal ones.As for the peculiarity,Chinese conjunctions must emerge in more circumstances while English conjunctions must be omitted in more circumstances.This kind of disparity results from rhythmic,cognitive and pragmatic elements behind the languages.Furthermore,the influence of normal or abnormal semantic relations and syntactic structures on the conjuntions' utilization can be seen as well in Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European language families.Researches on the collocation patterns and word order tendencies of Chinese and English conjunctions have once again testify Universal 13,Universal 14 and Universal 15 proposed by Greenberg(1966).On the basis of comparable corpuses LCMC and FLOB,we make an overall investigation into the word order tendencies of four major types of conjunctions in Chinese and English respectively.If a conjunction tends to appear in the first clause of the complex sentence,we can regard it as pre-position,otherwise as post-position.From the prospective of pre-position,they can form a common sequence: conditional conjunctions > concessive conjunctions > causal conjunctions > purpose conjunctions.That is to say,conditional conjunctions have the greatest possibilities to occupy a pre-position in the sentence,while purpose conjunctions have the lowest possibilities.The similarities and peculiarities in collocation patterns between Chinese and English conjunctions have given an adequate explanation toward those three universals mentioned above.A typological approach is adopted to probe into the word order characteristics,especially on the word order harmoniousness between concessive conjunctions and basic word order or preposition word order.To begin with,the definiton of concession and its two possible evoloving routes are briefly discussed,and then attention is shifted to the semantic origins and morphological features of concessive conjunctions.Furthermore,we carry out a survey about the word order of concessive conjunctions in 42 languages from six different language families which include Indo-European,Sino-Tibetan,Altaic,Austroasiatic,Austronesian and Uralic.It is shown that conjunctions are harmiously in accordance with the word order of VO or OV.Besides,the word order of conjunctions and prepositions also demonstrate a strict uniformity.Subsequently,we safely present three most important underlying motivations namely Principle of Relator,preposition-conjunction conversion words and diachronic evolovement between preposition and conjunction.