The Focus Of Its Means Of Expression, Of The Modern Chinese

We introduce the general conditions of domestic focus study. Base on these, this thesis does the study on the focus in Chinese and it's reflecting tactics. This thesis is divided into four parts except the introduction and conclusion.1. The conception, character and classification of focusFocus is a pragmatic conception, it's the main point that the speaker wants to emphasis and been endowed with the biggest informational strength. Focus including two kinds: the natural focus and the contrastive focus. The natural focus just owns emphasis, without contrastive function, while the contrastive focus owns both the emphatic function and also could find the contrastive object in the context. There could be more than one focus, and also could be no one in a sentence.2. The representing of focus by phonic tacticsAs the most important and the most convenient tactics to display the focus, stress can be categorized into two kinds: Common stress and Contrastive stress. Common stress with the principle of end-weight is a stress frame in the sentence without special context, while the modification appended should often carry common stress. The contrastive stress should appear in varied positions according to the part emphasized, and has no direct connection with syntax frame. The common stress shows the natural focus, while the contrastive stress shows the contrastive focus.3. The representing of focus by lexical tacticsMark of focus is an important tactics to mark the contrastive focus, and in modern Chinese language, only two such focuses:"shi"(是) and"lian"(连). The mark of focus is a pragmatic conception, while the present classified standard of words is the syntax function of the word, so it is very hard to classify the mark of focus"shi"(是) and"lian"(连) into any word class. Focus-sensitive operator having its primary semantic meaning and the syntax function is not a professional means to represent focus. Without the mark of focus, the semantic target of the focus-sensitive operator is comparatively easy to be focus element.In modern Chinese language, there are another two elements sensitive to focus:"Negation"and"interrogative". The negative centre is the focus in a negative sentence, while the interrogative point is the focus in the interrogative sentence.4. The representing of focus by syntax tacticsConstituent order contains syntactic constituent order, semantic constituent order and pragmatic constituent order. We should distinguish static constituent order and dynamic constituent order. We discuss the relationship between the"Prepositional Object"and the expression of focus in ancient Chinese. In modern Chinese, the variation of constituent order and the expression of focus are closely related to each other.Some other sentence frame, such as parallel frame, positive and negative forms, are both important tactics of the expression of contrastive focus in modern Chinese language.