Pragmatic Motivations For Syntactic Change

Each language in the world has its most typical clause types and forms. The various clause types and forms can be seen as a system. In the system, the clauses which are in agreement with the cognitive patterns are unmarked clauses and the subject, verb, object and other clause elements occur in the usual order. In such situation , there is consistency between the form and meaning. To the contrary , marked clauses do not follow the cognitive patterns and they are the variants of the usual declarative order. In this situation, there is deviation between the form and meaning. Both the unmarked and marked clauses must have their own pragmatic values if they are exist in the language and to be used in verbal communication.The pragmatic motivations which lead to syntactic change need to be further explored and studied. Generally speaking, focus and emphasis can be achieved through syntactic change, but they are not comprehensive enough. The marked clauses in the English and Chinese languages are studied from pragmatic perspective in the thesis. The pragmatic motivations that lead to syntactic change may include context, end-weight, expression of exclamation, topic introduction and continuity, etc. It is just those motivations that cause the unmarked clauses to change into the marked ones in verbal communication.The study of pragmatic motivations for syntactic change in English and Chinese is not only helpful to grammar teaching, but also valuable to translating from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English.