A RRM Study Of Informational Focus Of Predicate-complement Structure VA

Focus has been of great interest to linguists and grammarians. Scholars ofdifferent schools have studied on this subject, involving its definition, classificationand marking devices, so on and so forth. They have made a great achievement andconstructed a quite systematic, scientific and explicit focus theoretical system.However, Focus is a complicated issue with many variables. Up to these days, thereare still many controversies over its definition, marking devices, semantic featuresand assigning features. Besides, Focus, as a pragmatic term, has not adequatelyconcerned by pragmatic studies. Its in-depth focalizing mechanism is also void ofexploration.Therefore, the present thesis, based on former studies, is intended to investigatethe Informational Focus (IF) assigning features of VA, the Chinesepredicate-complement structure, and attempts to seek for the pragma-cognitiveinterpretation of its focalizing mechanism and its theoretical motivation byReference-Relevance Model (RRM), which is combined by Cognitive ReferencePoint (CRP) and Relevance Theory (RT). This study is illustrated by observingChinese construction “VA de N”, an ordinary structure in Chinese. This structure isnot a focus sensitive one, so it will not fundamentally affect the focus assignment.The IF assignment features studied in this thesis is the comparative analysis of theinformation value of V and A, namely, the possibility of being the information centerconveyed by the utterer.By analyzing the structure “VA de N”, the element A mainly functions as resultcomplement, degree complement and condition complement. When A is a resultcomplement, the Focus Sensitivity (FS) of V is higher than that of A. When V is nota result complement, the FS is determined by the Semantic Selectional Restriction(SSR) of these two elements. Meanwhile, when we concern this construction in aspecific context, it is the parameter Focus Markedness (FM) which is negativelyrelated with FS that can assist our recognition of the focus. When FM of an element is very high, it is less likely to be the focus in a default situation. When this elementis assigned as the focus in a specific context, it will be very marked. In this case, thefocus is usually a pragmatic one which refers to the focus meant to update and stressthe felicity conditions of the element. By RRM, we wish to provide a reasonableexplanation for the cognitive mechanism of the focus assigning process. In addition,this paper also illustrates the theoretical motivation of the focus assignment features,namely, the different focus sensitivity is due to the different Relevance Degree (RD)between the given knowledge of the information receiver and the information target(A or V in particularly in this study).