The Analysis Of The Modifier-head "Noun+Noun" Structure In Contemporary Chinese

The "noun+noun" structure has always been one of the most important research subjects in contemporary Chinese. Many scholars have analyzed this structure and achieved a lot in the perspective of traditional linguistics, transformational generative linguistics, cognitive linguistics and computational linguistics.This dissertation studies the syntactic and semantic features of modifier-head "noun+noun" structure based on predecessor’s achievement. Combined with the theory framework of cognitive linguistics, it aims to sum up the formation law of this structure.The dissertation includes five parts.The first chapter introduces the summary of previous research results, and describes the theoretical basis of this article, the research scope and corpus used.The second chapter studies the formation of modifier-head "noun+noun" structure in syntactic. On the foundation of "Three-dimensional Theory", we studied syntactic features of this structure. In this dissertation, the modifier-head "noun+noun" structure consists of two groups:modifier-head "noun+noun" phrases and modifier-head "noun+noun" compound words, distinguished by different internal structures and syntactic structures Morpheme constituting compound words have neither grammaticality nor syntactic function. Therefore, we take the modifier-head "noun+noun" structure as a whole to study its syntactic function in the sentence, acting as a subject, object and attribute in most occasions and serving as a predicate and adverbial in few cases while being not able to act as a complement.The third chapter analyzes the semantic asymmetry in modifier-head "noun+noun" structure. We find the differences between surface semantic and deep semantic relations in the process of semantic analysis.Since "noun+noun" structure is not a simple superposition of semantic relations while the two nominal composition are linked by the predicate term, which concentrating the mean of clauses in a construction, there is a phenomenon of predicate implied in this "noun+noun" construction. In this dissertation, we analyze the deep semantic of modifying "noun+noun" structure by using Predication Structure Theory and Semantic Case Theory. Nominal composition in the deep semantic grid is summarized through the classification of Implicit predicate in modifier-head "noun+noun" structure. And we aim to explore the causes of the ambiguity in this structure and the way of digestion ambiguity.In the fourth chapter, we analyze the deep semantic of modifier-head "noun+noun" structure in the framework of cognitive linguistics theory.We sum up the semantic framework based on predication. Different semantic frameworks are found to exist in modifier-head "noun+noun" structure, and the complex framework is constituted by simple ones. The formation process of modifier-head "noun+noun" structure follows the recursive and simplifying principle.The fifth chapter concludes the contribution, innovations and shortcomings of this dissertation.