A Study Of The Empty Categories In Shi Shuo Xin Yu

Based on the corpus study of Shi Shuo Xin Yu, a literary sketchbook in Liu Song time of South Dynasty, this thesis gives systematical and comprehensive depiction of the empty categories in Shi Shuo Xin Yu under the guidance of the empty category theory. The study reveals the syntax structure and the co-reference of the empty categories in Shi Shuo Xin Yu. Further, the study compares the empty categories in Shi Shuo Xin Yu with the empty categories in Modern Chinese and analyses the pragmatic factors that influence the empty categories in Shi Shuo Xin Yu. The thesis is composed of three parts.On the basis of thorough investigation, the first part analyses and describes the general picture of the empty categories in Shi Shuo Xin Yu in detail using the method that combines quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis. It divides the empty categories in Shi Shuo Xin Yu into three categories:trace, proform and ellipsis. Then, it divides these empty categories into many sub-categories according to different syntax constructs and gives the appearence rate of these sub-categories. Further, it analyses the syntactic characteristics of the representative clauses and summarizes the structure formula of these representative clauses'structural variants.The second part analyses the co-reference of the empty categories in Shi Shuo Xin Yu. Though empty category has no pronunciation and writing form, it has precise meaning. And the meaning of empty category is expressed by its co-referential noun phrase. In different kinds of empty categories, the distributional characteristics of its co-referential noun phrases are different. This part investigates these co-referential noun phrases'distribution and analyses their distribution regularities.The last part summarizes the essential characteristics of the empty categories in Shi Shuo Xin Yu:1) Most empty categories in Shi Shuo Xin Yu are ellipses and proforms.And the frequency of occurrence of traces is low.2) The types of syntax structures that contains empty categories are various.3) The number of the empty categories placed before verbs are much greater than the empty categories placed after verbs. Furthermore, this parts analyses the empty categories in Shi Shuo Xin Yu by means of comparing them with the empty categories in Modern Chinese and pragmatic analysis. It throws light on the similarities and differences between the empty categories in Shi Shuo Xin Yu with the empty categories in Modern Chinese and analyses pragmatic factors that include the focus expression and context that affect some empty categories.