Sentence With Chinese "bi"

The ability to compare things constitutes the basic cognitive ability of human beings, which gets proofed by the fact that every language in the world has its category to express comparison. The sentence with a proverb "bi" gets a lot of attention for its uniqueness. The structuralism-based studies detailed its syntactic and semantic traits through meticulous depictions and some studies on its origin also appeared with the introduction of the theory of Grammaticalization. However, there is still little understanding of the reason that makes "bi" sentence replace its rivalry, the sentence with a proverb "yu ", the pragmatic value of the adverb "geng" used in "bi" sentence and the status of "bi" sentence from the viewpoint of linguistic typology. This paper is thus oriented to give an answer to these questions in the framework of the functional-typological approach.This paper consists of six chapters.Chapter 1 is a foreword elucidating the meaning of studying this selected topic, the linguistic method adopted in this paper and the reason to do so, the source of the examples and some existing difficulties.Chapter 2 emphasizes on some principles of cognitive psychology to discover the cognitive reason making "bi" sentence overwhelm its rivalry, the sentence with a proverb "yu", and become the commonest expression of comparison in Chinese in the considering of arranging information in the most efficient way.Chapter 3 discusses the effect on the development of "bi" sentence by the rise of the structure combining a verb and its complementary.Chapter 4 analyses the use of adverb "geng", which is generally considered to express the augment of degree, in "bi" sentence and gives an explanation in the background of Face-saving Theory raised by Brown and Levinson.Chapter 5 takes two discoveries achieved in chapter 2 and chapter 3 as the criteria to complete a reclassification of many Chinese dialects and some foreign languages.Chapter 6 reaches a conclusion.