The Fine-Granularity Description Of Chinese Grammar Based On The Lexicon-Grammer Theory

Conventional linguistic studies, like other scientific researches, were influenced byancient Greek metaphysical essentialism. Traditional grammarians always tried to finddefinite and simple rules behind the complex language phenomena, but the rules havealways been challenged by the numerous exceptions and unexpected new linguisticphenomena. In this paper, we hold the opinion that the rules are not as simple as wewishfully expected. What is more, there are no clear boundaries between rules. What thelinguists need to do is to find the relatively distinct cut-off points out of the complete chartof the linguistic kingdom.To a certain degree, descriptive Chinese grammar studies have been ignored in recentyears. Based on the corpuses, we found that even the widely-used The ContemporaryChinese Dictionary (Xiandai Hanyu Cidian) fails to cover all the linguistic phenomenaconcerning the rules of character “na”(拿).In this paper we took the Chinese word “na”as an example. With the corpus-basedapproach, we followed the Lexicon-Grammar theory to reconstruct the semantic system of“na”, and add elementary sentences to each meaning. We also gathered the statistics of theusage frequencies of the meanings and elementary sentences, which provided statisticalbasis for us to revise the entry of“na”in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary. At thesame time, we listed the essential complements from the graded HSK vocabulary for thehigh-frequency elementary sentences. Finally, based on the study of“na”, we tried to finda new paradigm to better describe Chinese at the fine-granularity level.