Reseach On Factives In Modern Chinese

Based on previous researches, this thesis is devoted to making a relatively reasonable and scientific definition for factive words of modern Chinese, rending detailed and systematic descriptions for their syntactic and symantic features in a macro view. Furthermore, by means of investigating these words'diachronic changes, we try to come up to some predicts for their trends in future.This article consists of seven chapters, amounting about 48,000 words.Chapter 1 presents the object and scope of study, the aim and significance of the topic, plus theoretical background, research methods and source of corpus.Chapter 2 provides an overview of this study, including the research of factive words as presupposition triggers, related research involved in other issues and the ontology of this kind. Some shortcomings of the previous researches are also pointed out in this part.Chapter 3 makes a discussion of the definition and range of factive words and so on.We consider a factive word as a factive operator,which constrains the small factual clause always following that factive word.The factive words include factive verbs involved in previous researches, adjectives, adverbs and some word-like structures having factive functions.We argue that factive words are not homogeneous in their interior and factive verbs can be divided into typical and atypical ones.Chapter 4 puts out detailed explanations for syntactic formats of factive words. In terms of factive verbs, factive adjectives and adverbs, we respectively discuss their syntactic formats of reflecting the factivity and transform relations of these formats. We find that these formats can be interchanged not only in one certain category, but also across different categories(especially for factive verbs and adjectives).Chapter 5 describes syntactic and semantic features of factive words. For syntactic features, related issues include the higher prediction, the realism orientation, the finite reference tendency and the relationship between factive words and the negative. As to semantic features, we discuss the subjective commentary, the implicit causality, thematic roles, and how to treat factive words from the perspective of synonyms and antonyms. All the syntactic and semantic features are only for typical factive words. Accordingly, for any factive word, the more features related it possesses, the more typical it is.Chapter 6 talked about the atypical factive words based on the theory of Functional Linguistics and Grammaticalization. The factive words are in the dynamic developing:the factive verbs especially the atypical ones have trends to approach to epistemic modality; the factive adjectives tend to have some functions of factive verbs through frequent utilization, such as, some can be followed by objective clauses;The factive adverbs are developing to the compositions which expressingthe prespective of speakers.The overall trend of factive words is that compositions with independent meanings are developing to ones with vague and general meanings, even with specific expressions of the prospective of speakers.As a conclusion of the thesis, chapter 7 summarizes the content and points out the shortcomings.