The Characteristic Of De Construction And Its Realizations In English

The "De" -construction is a basic syntactic pattern in modern Chinese, and it is often regarded as one of its characteristic grammatical phenomena. It has long attracted much attention from grammarians both at home and abroad. Yet it has been seldom studied from the perspective of contrastive linguistics. As a bold endeavor, this thesis, by taking a contrastive and a semantic approach to the issue, tries to find out how the Chinese Ba-construction is realized in English. The whole thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter one introduces the scope of the research, a literature review, its methodology, theoretical framework, and its significance of the research.Chapter two makes a semantic analysis of the De-construction within the framework proposed by Chomsky. An important conclusion from the discussion is that causative can unify many types of the De-construction. And then we classifies the De-construction into two types according to conclusion, that is "De"construction containing causative meaning, and "De" construction without causative. In order to study in a deep way, we divide the "De"construction with causative into three types, and the " De " construction without causative into three types.Chapter three discusses the characteristic of the "De" construction containing causative meaning and its English realizations .Chapter four deals with the characteristic of the "De" construction without causative meaning, and its realization in English.Chapter five presents the major conclusions arrived at in this thesis.Among many others, our major findings are that the English syntactic patterns of SVOC (English typical causative structure) , simple sentence (containing a causal prepositonal phrase), complex sentence (with the main clause expressing cause, and the subordinate clause expressing effect) are typically adopted to express causative situations, and they are normally used to realize the "De"-construction, and that these three types of English syntactic patterns and the De-construction are both the results of grammatical blending in the expression of causation in both languages. While, the "De" construction without causative are mainly realized English syntactic patterns of SV(O)+ adverbial and SV+adverbial+C and so on.