A Multi-perspective Study Of Duiyu: And Its Comparison With Guanyu And Zhiyu

The Preposition has been the focus of the grammar research. From Ma Shi Wen Tong, the attention began to be paid to the preposition in Chinese grammar circles and more fruitful results have been obtained. In modern Chinese, Duiyu is a common preposition discussed by various dictionaries and several modern Chinese textbooks. Based on exhaust observation and integration of several tens of millions corpus, the present thesis is to systematically describe Duiyu from syntax, grammatical meaning and function.Firstly, Duiyu can be mainly classified into four kinds as for its sytactical distribution, ie "S+Duiyu X+VP", "Duiyu X+S+VP", "Duiyu X laishuo" and "Duiyu X+de+XP". The statistics shows that its location at the beginning of sentence is most frequently used in modern Chinese. Even if Duiyu exists between the subject and the predicate, the relation between prepositional phrase and with the modifier is somewhat looser. This is significantly different from the typical adverbial element.Secondly, as for the grammatical sense of Duiyu, the grammar research already done often focuses on its relation with the predicate verb and has been compared with the subject-predicate-object sentence so as to demonstrate that the main grammatical function of Duiyu is to lead to patient. The present study finds that in an adition to above grammtical sense, the component introduced by Duiyu sometimes has something to do with the noun , for example, it can function as a dative item. And it is also found that it can form semantic relation with a minor sentence. Thus, three kinds of relations can be generalized as two major types. The first type is that the relation with the predicate verb and nouns is the direct semantic one, which casts into the sentence flat surface, while prepositional element is a necessary semantic component. The other type shows the relation with the whole sentence, which exceeds the semantic relation of syntactic category, thus Duiyu can bear the color of topic.Finally, this thesis analyses the function of topic marker introduced by Duiyu if it is located at the beginning of a sentence. The prepositional object has its own location , which is totally different from the subject and its own grammatical meaning as well. Therefore, all of them show that it is a component of a topic. Furthermore, we have made a comparative study of theme sentence introduced by Duiyu , Guanyu and Zhiyu, which reveales the similarities and differences of them in topic mark function.