The Motivations Of Chinese Grammar And Its Enlightenments To The Teaching Of Chinese As A Foreign Language

Motivation is a notable characteristic of Chinese. In the last few years, with the rise of functional linguistics, especially with the development of cognitive linguistics, the range of study of the linguists began to expand from phonetics, morphology to syntactic and pragmatics, thus we find the motivation behind language symbols and the meaning they stand for. The study of Chinese motivation is a fairly new academic topic. Though the reflections of motivation started very early in China, modern linguist did lots of exploration toward motivation of languages, their results are not often seen, especially apply them to the teaching of Chinese as a second language. So, it is necessary and meaningful to combine the study of motivation of Chinese grammar and the teaching of Chinese as a second language. It will benefits Chinese teaching to the foreign learner.This paper consists of five parts:The first part is Introduction. It mainly introduces the reason, range, methodology and aim, meaning of this paper. Followed by literature review of this field, starting from the focus of linguists, the motivation and arbitrariness, then we summed up the literature of home and abroad of the grammatical motivation.The second part of this thesis is the theoretical foundation of it. We introduce the relevant concept, definition and principles of this field, paving theoretical foundation.The third part of it is the illustrations of Chinese grammar motivations and iconicity, including quantity iconicity, proximity/distance iconicity, sequence/linearity/order iconicity and the principles of iconicity and economic, providing the theory and material for the Teaching of Chinese as a second language for the next part.The fourth part tells the implications of the previously discussed theories and principles, including the present situation and the problems we found and considered of Teaching of Chinese as a second language, the application of grammar motivation and iconicity, for example to improve the efficiency of teaching, the textbook edition and the acquisitions of Chinese, and so on.Last but not the least is the summary of this thesis. We summed up the conclusion, the insufficient part, and the field that need the further exploration.