Modern Chinese Complex Sentence Basic Research

The study of complex sentence can be traced back to 《Ma shi Wen tong》 ,the first grammar work in China. The study of complex sentence approximately has experienced three phases: firstly, the study of meanings; secondly, the study of structure ; And thirdly, the comprehensive study from all- directions and many-angles. Up to now, scholars have reached fruitful achievements. But complex sentence is always the unsettled problem in the circle of grammar. Particularly the distinction between simple sentence and complex sentence always gets unclear, undefined and unsatisfactory standards. Therefore in the 1980's it caused the controversy if complex sentence exist in Chinese language. Some scholars consider Chinese complex sentence is the simple imitation of English compound sentence. They are not accord with Chinese language fact, and should be cancelled.However, most scholars admit that the language phenomenon of complex sentence do exist in Chinese after a thorough study of Chinese language facts, though simple and complex sentence may band together sometimes. The author also agrees with the standpoint.So this text is intended from a few aspects to study complex sentence:1. The study of complex sentence history, which can mostly be divided into three stages.2. The comparison between Chinese and English complex sentence. Although Chinese complex sentence have no the two characters that English complex sentence has, it does not follow that Chinese language does not have complex sentence. On the contrary almost each language exists complex sentence. It leads to the basic function about complex sentence is"narration function".3. Traditional views can't distinct complex sentence from simple sentencesatisfactorily. In this part the author uses the new standard --"narration function"to solve this problem,and to distinguish a few sentence patterns that mix simplesentence with complex sentence. Finally though two discourses analysis, the author uses the related datas to elucidate the distribution of complex sentence and simple sentence.4. The study about four special complex sentence patterns.5. Conclusion.There are some more problems such as the study of special complex sentence, the relations between complex sentence and the rhetorical devices, the use of some new theories in the complex sentence etc. They demands scholars further study.