A Study Of Compliments Used In The Mencius

This essay aims to probe into the compliments used in the Mencius. It is hoped that through this study it will reveal the structure, types of meanings and features of the compliments used in ancient Chinese during War Dynasty's period, and meantime provide some reliable conclusion for the further study of the characteristics of the compliments and even the syntax structures of ancient Chinese at that time, and thus promote the appropriate interpretation of the Mencius and some other classic literature before Qin Dynasty. The semantic indication theory and semantic structure analysis method are employed in this essay to define the compliments and distinguish them from objectives; the depiction from categories and the combination of semantics, syntax and pragmatics theories are used to analyze the compliments in the Mencius; while contrast and discrimination are utilized for sub-categories comparison, mathematic statistical method for detection and explanation to the formation and classification in meanings of the location complements used in the Mencius.This essay consists of five chapters: there are three chapters in its main body with an introduction chapter and a conclusion chapter.The first chapter deals with the writing of the Mencius and the value of the study of its language. It summarizes the accomplishments and the current problems existing in both the grammatical study and compliment study of ancient Chinese. What is compliment and what are the differences between compliments and objectives are discussed in this part. It also gives further discussion about the significance, theory and method of studying the Mencius.The second chapter is about the formation of the compliments used in the Mencius. The compliments in the Mencius are formed by prep-object phrases, the word "yan", nouns and noun-phrases, localizer words and localizer phrases, quantifier words. The prep-object phrases are the most frequently used as compliments in the Mencius, with totally 575 cases accounting for 86.2% of all the compliments. Among all these prep-object phrases, the introducing prep-objects are formed by six prepositions: Yu, yu, yi, hu, zhu and yan (in Chinese pingyin).In Chapter Three, the types of meanings of compliments in the Mencius are coped with here. With accordance to the various meanings in the context, the compliments in the Mencius are categorized into six types: location, object, resort, quantity, reason and time. Among this system, three compliment types—location, resort, and object, are mostly used in the Mencius. Totally, there are 331 location, 246 object and 63 resort compliments respectively. These three types of compliments account for 96.0% in all and the portion of the rest three without systemic features is relatively small.In Chapter Four, from the semantic perspective, I have attempted to argue about the same expressions with compliments and objects, and about the semantic and syntactic relationships between compliments and adverbials. Separately, I have commented on the semantic and syntactic relationships between object compliments and patient objects, and location compliments and location objects, and the use of the word "Yu" with the meaning of location as compliments and adverbials.In Chapter Five, I try to summarize two characteristics of the compliments used in the Mencius.