Subjectification And The Cancellation Of Syntactic Constraints

This thesis mainly focuses on two kinds of phenomena in which syntactic constraints are cancelled:some ungrammatical syntactic structures become acceptable with the adding of certain subjective components; the adding of subjective forms also extends syntactic functions in some expressions which seem to be unacceptable in discourse.The research on the cancellation of syntactic constraints is sporadic, both in China and abroad. It has been focused on the following four aspects:subjectification and the changing of interpretation structure, subjectification and word ordering, subjectification and the long-distance reflexivisation and subjectitification and the extension of syntactic functions. These studies successfully show the interpretation power of subjectification to syntactic phenomena whereas they are not deep enough and expose some problems and inadequacies.We mainly talk about the language forms that express subjectivity and how these expressions embody speaker's perspective, affect and epistemic stance. Besides, this study also attempts to discuss the relationship between subjectification and the cancellation of syntactic constraints, as well as the process of cancellation. The notion subjectification explored here concerns the structures and strategies where a language speaker uses to realize his/her perspective or point of view and the relevant processes of language evolution themselves. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, subjectivity and subjectification play an essential role in the analyses of how meaning is created and construed.Through a systematic study on the cancellation of syntactic constraints, this thesis puts forward the following ideas:Language forms that express subjectivity include tense and aspect, modal verbs, modal adverbs, mood particles, quantitative components, etc. These expressions reveal speaker's perspective, affect and epistemic stance. After subjectification, the utterance is no longer a pure expression of propositional thoughts; it also includes speaker's evaluation, epistemicity or judgment to the events. In this way, its syntactic function becomes more abstract and pragmatic and thus the sentence acceptability is improved. The result of subjectification in constructions is that the original inflectional and selectional constraints are cancelled and the syntactic functions are shifted.The application of subjectification to the explaining of syntactic constraints can not only help us reveal the commonness of correlated linguistic phenomena, it will also widen our understanding to'subjectification', as well as giving an example on its interpretation power to syntactic phenomena in modern English, Chinese and other languages.