A Cognitive Approach To Chinese Generic Sentences

The research of generic-ness can be traced back to1970s, however, up until now, no unanimously accepted theory has been set up. As to linguistic research, structural and formal linguistics is the main stream, but it ignores the indelible relationship between this concept and human thought, therefore could not reveal the true motivation for exceptions tolerance; this thesis attempts to solve this issue based on cognitive theoretic frames. Discussions about the two significant atypical Chinese generic manifestations, generic zhe and yi+classifier+N construction, are fairly sporadic,therefore need explanatory study; currently, very little research is conducted in syntactic-semantic constraints of Chinese generic sentences, this thesis tries to make some efforts in this respect. Under the guidance of hierarchy hypothesis and subjectivization, this thesis mainly arrives at the following three aspects of findings:1) Exceptions tolerance concerning characterizing sentences results from a cognitive reasoning process evoked by hierarchical psychological models, selection of suitable sub-models is determined by the whole SP structure, exceptions are irrelevant to quantification in essence;2) Generic zhe is a derivative of the recognitional and situational usages of the deictic zhei, it is typical of strong topic sense, mainly used to stress personal beliefs and attitudes, the grammaticalization it experiences is accompanied by obvious affect and epistemic subjectivization; Generic yi is generally used to fulfill a communicative requirement of advocating universal truths targeting at certain individuals, therefore having a relatively weaker propositional meanings and higher subjectivity degree compared to generic BCN, the animacy requirement and incompatibility with generic testing frame make generic yi+classifier+N more marked than generic zhe in distributions, therefore denying the common knowledge about basic Chinese generic manifestations;3) syntactic-semantic constraints analysis mainly touches on the issue of referential meaning match; activity verbs show a weakened referential sense as a result of subjectivization, therefore could match the generic subject NP, as senses of subjective attitudes increases, verbal sense diminishes, and its force of constraints on arguments gradually disappears, thus exhibiting restricted syntactic variations.Therefore, our cognitive approach explains the difficult issue exceptions tolerance well; researches on motivations for generic zhe and generic ji+classifier+N,combined with syntactic-semantic analysis promote this study to an explanatory level.