Theory And Application Of Diathesis

The study of syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface has been a hot topic in linguistic theory research and empirical analysis in recent years,among which theory of diathesis is a concentrated embodiment of the multi-interface study of language.The corresponding relationship between semantic valences,syntactic arguments and its communicative rank of participants of predicates is called diathesis.Taking the concept of diathesis as the breakthrough point,extensively absorbing and drawing upon the latest academic ideas in the fields of lexical semantics,syntactic semantics and lexicography,this dissertation systematically reviews theory and application of diathesis,mainly focuses on the analysis of diathesis of Russian verbs and the relevant investigation of nouns,adjectives and adverbs as predicates in Russian and Chinese under the principle of objective and adequate description as well as reasonable and effective explanation.The specific research contents of this dissertation include: investigating the transmutation and evolution of the concept of diathesis through extensive and in-depth study of literature,and presenting the history of diathesis study;inspecting the explanatory power of diathesis in studying the syntactic-semantic relations of generalized predicates,revealing the scope of application of diathesis theory,distinguishing and describing various situations of diathetic displacement in detail;adopting different standards to classify diathesis of Russian verbs,characterizing and explaining diathesis of some Russian verb categories;studying the syntactic-semantic-pragmatic attributes of nouns,adjectives,and adverbs that can serve as predicates in Russian,and trying to use the theory of diathesis to analyze some Chinese materials.This dissertation innovatively systematizes theory of diathesis,introduces it into the domestic linguistic circle,and tries to explain it with a large number of language materials in Russian and Chinese.This helps to examine the application value of the theory itself objectively and comprehensively,present the syntactic-semanticcommunicative characteristics of predicates,and analyze the complex and variable correspondence between multiple levels of sentence semantics.The study of diathesis of Russian and Chinese generalized predicates deepens the thought and content of semantic research and explores new ideas and methods for analyzing sentence semantics actively and effectively.The research in this dissertation shows that diathesis exists universally in all predicates,has universality for different languages and strong explanatory power for different linguistic facts,and is of great significance to the study of form-semantic correspondence and communicative functional status conversion.Diathesis is regarded as an effective method to guide linguistic interface research.On one hand,we can perfect theoretical system of diathesis;on the other hand,we can find and explain some practical problems in linguistic research,combine theory with practice to explore the innovative field of linguistic research.