Comparative Study On The Syntactic Function Of Chinese Verb Reduplications

Reduplication is encountered in every language and linguists have paid special attention to this language phenomenon. Chinese Verb reduplication has been a frequent topic which has been studied by many linguists in China. Former studies have been focused on the following areas:the range and constraints of verb reduplication, the semantic meaning, syntactic function and pragmatic function of verb reduplication. A great many of accomplishments have been made by those former researches. However, it still remains many unsolved problems and disagreements. Especially when comes to the comparative study on different types of verb reduplication. On the one hand, former studies on this issue are very weak and incomprehensive. On the other hand, it is very important to make scientific researches on the differences showed by these reduplicated verbs since verb reduplication is quite common in both oral and written Chinese.Former studies on this issue are mainly from the respects of semantic meaning and pragmatic function. Little attention has been paid to the differences of syntactic function. The research objects of former studies are the two or three types of single syllable verb reduplications, such as VV&V yi V, VV&V yi xia, VV&V yi V&V yi xia. There is no comparative study on double syllables verb reduplication ABAB&AB le AB or single/double verb reduplications.According to the unsolved problems mentioned above, this dissertation is to compare and contrast five types of verb reduplications VV, ABAB, V yi V, V le V and AB le AB from the aspect of syntactic function. Firstly, describe and illustrate the differences of these five types of verb reduplications when they are placed in the same syntactic components. Secondly, compare their abutting components. Thirdly, study them in some special sentence patterns. The reasons contribute to the differences are also explained. Reduplicated Verbs covered in this dissertation are picked from the Modern Chinese Verb Usage Dictionary and a large-scale of corpus is also used. Hopefully, this dissertation will fill the gap in the area of reduplicated verb comparison, improve the study of verb reduplication and help people to have a better understanding of this language phenomenon. Apparently, it will also enrich our knowledge of the Chinese language and the research findings will be useful in Chinese language teaching.