A Study Of Argument Structure In "Qi Min Yao Shu"

Based on the corpus study of"Qi Min Yao Shu", a Chinese agricultural book in the Northern -Wei Dynasty, this thesis gives comprehensive descriptions and analyses on the argument structures in this book. Conducted from the stylistic perspective and instructed by the theory of argument structure, this study reveals the syntactic forms of this book, which has its own stylistic features. Further, the discourse interpretations on the analytic results of argument structures are presented from static and dynamic aspects. The thesis is composed of three chapters.Chapter one is a general introduction about stylistics. It begins by outlining the close relations between stylistics and language features, as well as the general characteristics of procedural discourse. Then the stylistic features of"Qi Min Yao Shu", including the discourse and syntactic features, are concluded from stylistic perspective (based on the procedural discourse).Chapter two offers a general review of argument structure. Adopting the quantitative statistics and qualitative methods, this chapter investigates and studies the argument structure of Qi Min Yao Shu in an exhaustive way. Then four types of argument structure, Zero-argument, single argument, double arguments and triple arguments, are concluded and the detailed descriptions of secondary types are presented respectively. On the basis of the descriptions, this chapter summarizes four features of argument structure in Qi Min Yao Shu: 1) single argument is the most fundamental; 2) There is an inclination to suppress the transitive agent; 3) the transitive object tends to be promoted; 4) the intransitive subject is highlighted; 5) There is an evidence that material, instrument and location arguments are foregrounded.Chapter three is the theoretical interpretation on the features of argument structure in procedural discourse. Integrating the static and dynamic analysis and based on the research results in Chapter two, this chapter discusses the projection of argument at semantic level in static way and explores causes and models contributed to the formation of non-conventional projection, which is conducted from the pragmatic level in dynamic way. The reasons and models are communicative factor and the priority of topics, which are relative with the procedural discourse.