A Study Of Interactions Of Grammar And Pragmatics With Special Reference To The Tense/Aspect,Voice And Mood In Chinese

The study of interactions or interfaces of grammar and pragmatics has become a cutting-edge but unresolved issue in pragmatics.As the literature indicates,the current grammar-pragmatics interface studies are theoretically limited.To be specific,the contextualist paradigm in post-Gricean pragmatics overlooks the importance of grammatical convention,and the semantic minimalist paradigm provides an insufficient explanation of grammatical convention.Moreover,the theoretical inquiries of interactions of grammar and pragmatics in the Western world are mainly based on usages of English,and the Chinese-based study of pragmatics and grammar is in need of being further systematized and theorized.Therefore,this study starts with a historical review of the relevant literature at home and abroad concerning the interactions of grammar and pragmatics,and provides a critique of the problems and limitations in the current theorizing.Drawing on naturally-occurring data collected from the BCC corpus,the study is oriented toward a theoretical investigation of interactions of grammar and pragmatics.Based on the re-defining of the core concepts such as grammar and pragmatics,a theoretical framework is constructed,theorizing the interaction of grammar and pragmatics as the two-way relationship of “choice and adaptation”,which is further evidenced by the usages of tense/aspect,voice and mood in Chinese.This study aims to answer the three research questions:(1)From the diachronic and synchronic perspectives,what is grammar and what is pragmatics? What kind of connection exists between grammar and pragmatics?(2)Based on the relationship of grammar and pragmatics,how is it possible to account for the interaction of grammar and pragmatics at a theoretical level?(3)Within the constructed theoretical framework,how are the interactions of grammar and pragmatics to be explained at a practical level with special reference to the usages of tense/aspect,voice and mood in Chinese?Based on the investigations of the above three questions,the conclusions are drawn as follows:1.Grammar can be defined as the result of pragmatic grammaticalization and pragmatics as the motivation of that grammaticalization on the diachronic level,while it can be defined as the coding resource system of meaning and pragmatics as the(grammar)choosing and(meaning)inferencing process on the synchronic level.The interaction of grammar and pragmatics is realized as pragmatic adaptation to grammar on the diachronic level,and grammar's adaptation to pragmatics on the synchronic level.2.The interaction of grammar and pragmatics uncovers the interaction between conventionality and intentionality in language use,and this interaction guarantees that grammar as conventionalized meaning coding resource system provides choices for language use,and pragmatics as the choice-making process adapts to the communicative intention.Therefore,this interaction is realized in general as “choice” and “adaptation” in language use.Compared with other existing theoretical perspectives,the “choice-adaptation” view better accounts for the interaction of grammar and pragmatics.3.The interactions of grammar and pragmatics are fully manifested in the usages of Chinese tense/aspect,voice,and mood,and to be specific:(1)Tense and aspect in Chinese represent multiple grammatical and lexical resource devices of temporal meaning expression.The choice of these grammar markers means the choice of both grammatical and pragmatic meanings as adaptation to the communicative intention.(2)The voice system in Chinese consists of active,middle and passive voices among which,the middle voice possesses partial features of both the active and the passive voice in form and meaning.The choice of different voice forms is constrained by the communicative intention of expressing the different agent-patient relationships.(3)Mood in Chinese is realized by grammatical forms like sentence types,mood particles,etc.The choice of mood forms is adapted to the expression of speaker's “pragmatic modality”(subjective attitude and stance).Therefore,the interaction of grammar and pragmatics cannot be explained without considering pragmatic contributions to grammatical phenomena and pragmatic adaptation to the choice of grammatical form.The contribution of this theoretical study lies in(1)providing a critical but integrative review of the theoretical conceptions of the grammar-semantics-pragmatics interaction so far available in the literature,(2)theoretically proposing the choice-adaptation view of the grammar-pragmatics interaction,and further(3)pushing forward research on interactions of grammar and pragmatics(especially on Chinese)towards systematization.