A Study On The Two-syllable Synonym Paratactic Combination Phenomenon

The synonym combination is an important language phenomenon both in ancient and modern Chinese. There have been many in-depth studies about the synonym combination in ancient Chinese. However, the synonym combination in modern Chinese has not caused widespread concern. On the basis of existing research methods and achievements, this thesis takes the two-syllable synonym paratactic combination in modern Chinese as the research object, and analysises the criterions of judging, classifications, syntactic functions, semantic differences and similarities of this linguistic phenomenon. And at last, the thesis summarizes overall characteristics of the phenomenon and discusses its functions in language useage. This thesis is comprised of five chapters.Chapter one introduces the research background, existing research achievements and study ideas of the thesis.Chapter Two defines the criterions to identify the synonym combination in modern Chinese, which include two aspects: form and meaning. In form, a group of synonyms should be closely connected together without a comma in the middle, while in meaning, a group of synonyms shoud be on the same grammatical level and acting as the same syntactic constituent. The two criterions must be met simultaneously, or they are not research objects of the thesis.Chapter Three categorizes examples of the synonym combination by parts of speech, which shows that there are synonym combination forms with both the same parts of speech and different parts of speech, and also with both notional word types and function word types. And then, this chapter discusses syntactic functions which synonym combination forms serve as in sentences, and points out that the synonym combination forms can be used as subject, predicate, object, attribute, adverbial modifier, complement. Chapter Four analyzes the semantic differences and similarities between a synonym combination form and each synonym which consists of the combination form. In semantics scope, the overall meaning of a combination form tends to be the addition of each synonym. In degree of meaning, the meaning of a combination form is offen a few heavier than each synonym's. In semantic colour, a combination form is generally consistent with both synonyms. In collocations, a combination form offen has the same collocations with both synonyms.Chapter Five summarizes overall characteristics of the synonym combination, including the imbalanced distribution of quantity, the loose grouping of structure, the flexibility of combination, the consistency of grammatical function and the entirety of semantic expression. According to these characteristics, the chapter discusses functions of the synonym combination in language useage, which include completing semantemes, emphasizing meanings and harmonizing sentences.The last part is the conclution which summarizes contents of the thesis and also proposes some problems that have not been solved yet and are needed further studies in future.