A Study On Conclusion Item Of Comparative Construction In Contemporary Chinese

The Comparative Construction is a special sentence structure in contemporary Chinese, whose syntactic meaning mainly reflected by the conclusion item. The thesis, basing on the related theory of cognitive linguistics, intends to analyze the conclusion item from the perspectives of grammar, semantics and pragmatics.To begin with, the author reviews the different classifications of comparative construction given by famous linguists. According to different comparative degrees, the Bi Comparative Construction can be categorized as equality comparison, discrepancy comparison and superlative comparison. For discrepancy comparison, the typical structures are: X more than YW and X less than YW. Next, the"X more than YW"structure is discussed in detail and the conclusion item of"X more than YW"structure can be classified as AP, NP and VP. In AP, the adjectives used in conclusion item can only be those characteristic adjectives which will show the different comparative degrees in VP, the conclusion item contains the psychological verbs, the verbs indicate increasing and decreasing and the divergence verbs, which always follow the characteristic adjectives or auxiliary verbs in NP, the conclusion item only includes"hai + N"structure. And then, the author compares the"X more than YW"structure and"X less than YW"structure, finding the major differences lie in three aspects. First, The conclusion item of"X less than YW"structure is often modified by the adverbs"geng"and"hai". In"X more than YW"structure, the comparative words showing the specific difference are found, while the"X less than YW"structure does not have this feature. Second, both commendatory and derogatory adjectives can be used in"X more than YW"structure, however,"X more than YW"structure has a strict requirement for the choice of adjectives. Third, the two structures have some differences in their conclusion item's constitution. Finally, the thesis presents the differences in conclusion item of"X more than YW"structure and"X less than YW"structure. Meanwhile, the influence of emotional coloring reflected by comparative words, such as"geng"and"hai"to pragmatic presupposition is briefly discussed.