Research On Temporal Relation Markers Of Chinese Compound Sentences

Relation marker is a semantic unit which marks the semantic relations between clauses before and after in Chinese compound sentences. More and more researchers began to pay close attention on the research of relation markers in compound sentences. By doing the research of different kinds of relation markers, it will help us to gain a better understanding of semantic connections as well as to have some positive effects on the computer recognition of Chinese compound sentences.In this paper, I intend to do some researches of the relation markers which arisen less attention in the grammar field. My research is based on the materials I have collected and related to the theory known as "Three Levels" in grammar. By using the methods of statistic analysis and comparative analysis, I will give the analysis of syntactic structures, semantic content and pragmatic function of the temporal relation markers in compound sentences.There are four parts in my paper. In part one, I discussed the classification of temporal relation markers. Based on the existing research results, we defined27relation markers such as "然后". According to the orders of the events and actions in the compound sentences, these relation markers are divided into three categories which are the starting markers, the ensuing markers, and the ending markers.This classification depends on the order of the events or actions. At the same time, ensuing markers can be divided into two subclasses according to the clearness of the semantic relations between clauses and the amount of examples which are used alone, such as ensuing markers A,"然后","接着","随后"and ensuing markers B,"又","再","就"In part two, I discussed the use of three kinds of temporal relation markers from the syntactic level. Firstly, among all the temporal markers only some fixed structures such as "-一……”就……”can be used alone.And its position in the compound sentences depends on the parts of speech and the subjects in the following clause. Secondly, the collocation of temporal relation markers can be divided into two forms,such as two words collocation and three words collocation. And such kinds of collocation only exists in ensuing markers and ending markers. The collocation can only be used before the predicate as an adverbial in the following clause.The temporal relation markers has two main functions. On one hand, it play a key role in bringing out the semantic content; on the other hand, it meets the requirements to express the language more clearly and makes the semantic representation more accurate. When the temporal relation markers collocate together, it is not necessary to use the starting markers and ending markers together, while the temporal relation markers must be used together in every kind of collocation. Compared with the single use of the temporal relation markers, the collocation form of temporal relation markers can make a complete expression of the situations or events and seems to be more logical.In part three, I discussed the semantic relations which are indicated by the temporal relation markers.The most obvious cognitive relation of the temporal compound sentences is that all the events happened successively. As the foundation of cognitive relations, we can also draw some reflections of the subjective relations of compound sentences from the temporal relation markers besides the cognitive relation. Such kinds of subjective relation can be divided into coherence relation and coordinative relation. Meanwhile,there are different kinds of understandings of the cognitive relations. The obvious cognitive relation in compound sentences is the successiveness, but it can also implys to other kinds of cognitive relation such as causal relation and adversative relation. The temporal relation markers play the role as indication, selection and transformation when reflecting these different semantic relations.In the last part of my paper, I discussed one pair of confusing temporal relation markers ":然后”and“后来”as well as the similarities and differences between "J" 是”and the normal temporal relation markers and causal relation markers. I gave the analysis from both of the syntactic and nematic level and especially pointed out their pragmatically characteristics based on our former results.