Comparative Study Of The Mongolian Chinese Common Semantic Grid

As a common phenomenon that exists in the deep structure of all languages, semantic case embodies different functions and categories of substantive words. In traditional linguistics, "case" indicates the morphological change of some agglutinative languages and inflecting languages. But in semantics, "case" indicates the transitive relationship between substantive words and predicative words. A deep and comprehensive study on case relationship is one of the most important fields in semantic and grammatical research.Based on the fruit of former research, this paper first divides the basic semantic cases in Mongolian into 8 categories which can be sub-divided into 14 sub-categories. After describing the semantic case in Mongolian in detail, this paper summarizes the characteristics of Mongolian semantic case marks: Mongolian semantic case includes zero semantic case, noun case appended element, noun possessive appended element, affixes, adverbs, postpositions, modal particle, etc. After that, this paper makes a contrast on Mongolian and Chinese semantic case with the methods and theories of contrastive linguistics, case grammar and semantics, and then finds out the corresponding form of basic Mongolian semantic cases in Chinese as well as some corresponding rules.Generally speaking, apart from the direct corresponding in the homographic case mark zero form, there is no one-to-one corresponding relationship between the two languages' case marks. Firstly, due to the differences in syntactical structure of the two languages, some Mongolian case marks are expressed by zero form in Chinese, and some are expressed by certain prepositions. Secondly, the corresponding relationship has also been influenced by the arrangement of sememes. With the influence of sememes, the same semantic case may be expressed with a different case mark in Chinese. Thirdly, context plays an undeniable role in the use of the corresponding semantic case. Under different context, one Mongolian semantic case mark may be matched with different words in Chinese.Finally, this paper analyses Mongolian and Chinese semantic case from the perspective of typology and comes to the conclusion that, the semantic case of the two languages share the following characteristics: 1) semantic case is a common phenomenon that exists in the deep structure of the two languages; 2)both Mongolian and Chinese regards predicates as the center of a sentence; 3) the number of semantic cases in the two languages are uncertain; 4)generally speaking, each semantic case has its certain case mark in the two languages. The differences are as follows: 1) the case mark of the two languages has its own features; 2) in Mongolian, the same case mark can indicate different semantic case, while in Chinese, there is no such phenomenon; 3) there is no one-to-one corresponding relationship between the two languages' semantic case marks.