A Contrastive Study Of Russian And Chinese Clause Complexes

The following paper explores the semantic and syntactic nature of the composition of Russian and Chinese clause complexes; this is a field of syntactic and contrastive study that rarely becomes a focus for scientific research. This work develops a deeper insight into the nature and features of the structure of Russian and Chinese clause complexes by applying the principles of cognitive linguistics, which views the grammar of language as a symbolic representation of human cognitive abilities, and thus takes all grammatical units as semantically meaningful and hence significant on all levels of organization of the composite structures.The following paper brings forth the grammatical hierarchies and basic grammatical notions of Russian and Chinese to explore them in the context of cognitive grammar in order to demonstrate their conceptual significance on various levels of clause complex organization. Furthermore, we demonstrate that great typological distance between Russian and Chinese stems from the nature of their basic structural units, which leads to a greater difference between the two languages on the level of complex syntactic structures. We try to reanalyze the meaning and conceptual content of the core elements constituting a clause as a representation of an event, i.e. a verb and its complements, in order to show how the processual or non-processual profile of a clause and its semantic role within a composite structure participate in an integration of several conceptualizations of events into one conceptual whole. Since Russian and Chinese verbs differ in their morphological nature, and as a result differ in the way they are capable of expressing certain verbal categories, we'll find that they use quite different mechanism for encoding events, as well as grounding and atemporalization of processual profile, which leads to different ways of conceptual subordination and clause integration. Finally, on the basis of the conceptual structure of relational predication, we examine different techniques of clause combination in Russian and Chinese. Starting from a simple juxtaposition of semantically equivalent clauses we move along the path of clausal subordination towards a complete conceptual and structural integration of two different clauses into one indissociable conception.