A Study Of The Internal Logical Structure Of"V₁+V₂" Construction In Modern Chinese

Chinese is a paratactic language system with no inflectional changes and there is no rigid (one-to-one) correspondence between Chinese word classes and the syntactic roles they are going to play in sentence. Generally speaking, there are six patterns commonly used for Chinese "verb+verb" structures, among which such a pattern that a verb (V) is composed of two different verbs (V] and V2), each of which contains a different pair of Chinese characters or syllables (A&B and C&D) is the most diversified and complicated one. Lu Jianming&Guo Rui (1998:8) classified such a pattern of Chinese double-verb "V1+V2" construction into seven types, namely, VV, V-V, SV, VO, VC, Attributive V and Adverbial V constructions.In contrast to Chinese, English is a hypotactic language system, which requires very complicated morphological inflections in grammar, such as number, tense, voice, aspect markers, to name just a few, and in practical use, English words have to strictly follow such grammatical rules on the syntactic level. According to English grammar, a combination of two verbs in English is inevitably to force one of them to change its form, or a conjunctive word is to be inserted between the two verbs. The relationship between V1and V2in English double-verb construction is relatively clear and with some definite patterns which mainly fall into three groups, namely, V1to V2(infinitive), V1and V2(parallel structure), and V1V2ing (VO structure). Obviously, the structure of English and Chinese double-verb "V1+V2" constructions are not well matched with each other, and definitely, such non-correspondence between the two languages may cause a lot of problems in English-Chinese translation, which calls for a systematic study of double-verb "V1+V2" construction in Chinese.According to construction grammar, a construction is a pairing of form and meaning with unpredictable implications spilling out of its component parts. Hence, a cross-language translation between English and Chinese double-verb "V1+V2" constructions requires not only an equivalent transfer of semantic meaning, but also a correspondence in its construction. Presumably, the key to such an expected translation lies in clear identification of the implicit connections between English and Chinese double-verb "V1+V2" constructions.On the basis of Lu Jianming&Guo Rui’s (1998) classification to Chinese double-verb "V1+V2" construction and taking the common features between English and Chinese double-verb constructions into consideration, the present thesis will re-sort the seven types of Chinese double-verb "V1+V2" construction into two categories, namely, constructions of linear parallel structure and constructions of biased hierarchical structure. It is highly advisable to conduct cross-language translation between English and Chinese double-verb "V1+V2" constructions in line with these two categories of structures. Besides, the present thesis will also give a brief account of the construction coercion to the individual component verbs from the whole constructions, in accordance with construction grammarians’ belief.