A Study On The Possession Category Of Modern Chinese

Possession Category is an important subject in the grammatical study of modern Chinese grammar. Systematic and detailed discussion to this category is favorable to not only the describing and explaining the peculiar expression of the Chinese Possession Category, but also helpful in teaching foreigners Chinese and the language processed by machine. So, considering both the form and meaning, we look into the Modern Chinese Possession Category through several aspects with the theories of cognition linguistic.Possession Category has several syntactic appearances in modern Chinese. And the two basic styles are:"N1/P+(yÇ’u)+N2"and"N1/P+(de)+N2".It has a due rule of the hiding and appearing of"de"in"N1/P+(de)+N2. It is usually affected by the structure of a sentence, the meaning of the words and the using of the language. But generally speaking, it is promoted by the"distance motivation".The possessor and possessum in"N1/P+(de)+N2"won`t certainly appear in the sentence. The possessum of the clause of Possession Category defaults or not depend on the semantic activating functions of the adjective as the predicate of a sentence. And the hiding of the possessor usually connect with valence of the possessum in the sentence. If the two possession clauses have the same possessor, we can delete the possessor of the latter clause when they are connected. Deleting of the possessum concerns that if the clause is the original Possession construction. The closer to the original construction, it is the freer to delete it. The semantic focus of"N1/P+(de)+N2"is another question we are going to concern about. We find that natural semantic focus of"N1/P+(de)+N2"is usually on possessum, and it is marked and conditional to focus on possessor. In such clause, the function of"de"is to show the semantic relationship between possessor and possessum, but not the possessum.