On The Speech Act Verbs In Contemporary Chinese

In the lexical study of contemporary Chinese, research about verbs, especially the research of Sub- Category verbs is always the Chinese researchers concerned. In this thesis, we take a category of verbs, which is called Speech Act Verbs(short as SAVs),as our studying objects, in the hope of revealing their characteristics on syntax, semantics, pragmatics through the systematic reviews, and also their using rules in contemporary Chinese.First of all, we define the SAVs in contemporary Chinese according to the Speech Act Theory, we also consult the Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese Verbs'Usage by Mèng Cóng and some others to get a vocabulary of 95 SAVs as our studying objects. In the classification, we consider the thematic role of SAVs as the classifying standards, and by this we classify the SAVs into two major categories. Then we classify the two major categories into further types separately by whether using the prepositions or not.Next, we describe the syntactic characteristics of SAVs particularly. Here we analyze the main and the secondary syntactic function of SAVs. We study the verb-object type and the complements after SAVs, as well as their function to be subjects, objects and attributes, which is the secondary function of SAVs. We also analyze their sentence structure and so on. From discussed above, we can see that there's a certain link between SAVs'syntactic characteristics and its semantic attributes.Then we study the semantic properties of SAVs. SAVs can dominate three necessary dependent constituents, which are agent, patient, and dative. The arrangement of them can cause the changes in the syntactic structure. And also SAVs dominate the semantic characteristics of the arguments. On the other hands, SAVs has a structure of timing process. In the continuum of verbs'timing process, SAVs shows a transition from act to change.Finally, we try to describe the function of SAVs in written language. In pragmatics, SAVs is an important way to show Speech Acts. There's a certain correlation between Speech Acts and SAVs that Speech Acts are always revealed by the corresponding SAVs in sentences, and relatively whether the sentences containing SAVs are reasonable totally depend on the semantic rules of Speech Acts. In other ways, SAVs can control the discourse structure in a chapter. Even can it control a bigger discourse structure through nesting with other SAVs or other minding verbs in a composite way. In the discourse, SAVs also often appear in the title of passages. Here except the function of controlling a discourse structure, SAVs are also the markers of passage contents and style.