Study On Pivotal Sentence In Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese serves as a vital turning point in the development of Chineselanguage. The Pivotal sentence, as one of the Chinese basic syntactic forms, almost spreadsthroughout the entire development of Chinese. Due to its particular sentence structure andsemantic schema, it is worthy of attention and academic study.This thesis selects seven typical literatures of Middle Chinese in order to focus on thestudy of Pivotal sentence in them at length. On the theoretical basis of “Three-plane”,aiming at outlining the general features of sentence in Middle Chinese, this thesissystematically analyzes and introduces Pivotal sentence in Middle Chinese in the respectsof syntactic form, semantics and pragmatics.First, from the perspective of syntax, the thesis analyzes the syntactic forms of pivotalsentence in Middle Chinese, and also distinguishes pivotal sentence from sentence withconsecutive predicates and double-object sentence; next, according to semantic features ofpivotal verbs, pivotal sentence in Middle Chinese is classified into five groups, and thecharacteristics of each group are extracted out. In addition, the thesis appropriately studiesthe pragmatics genres and empty phenomenon of pivotal sentence in Middle Chinese. Atlast, the author diachronically compares pivotal sentence in Middle Chinese with pivotalsentence in ancient Chinese and modern Chinese in order to demonstrate its characteristicsof the time.