The Study On The Comparison Between “vxiang” And ”vwang” In Modern Chinese

In modern Chinese, both “xiang” and “wang” can be put behind some verbs to form “Vxiang+O” and “Vwang+O”. Usually we tend to believe in these two formats both “xiang” and “wang” are used to indicate the direction of the movements and can be freely substituted for each other. But the truth is that “xiang” and “wang” can only be replace by each other under some special conditions, not under any condition. This shows to us that the formats “Vxiang+O” and “Vwang+O” are not totally same and there must be some differences between these two formats. This thesis is mainly focused on the comparison between these two formats. First I will describe the synchronic differences of them and then I will try to find the sources that cause the differences from the diachronic point of view. The whole thesis is comprised of six chapters.Chapter One is the introduction. It mainly introduces the research background and meanings of the selected topic and the research methods and the corpus that I am going to use in this thesis.Chapter Two is the respective study on the verbs that can be used in “Vxiang+O” and the verbs that can be used in “Vwang+O”. First I will have an entire investigation of the verbs that can be used in the two formats respectively. And then I will make a comparison between the verbs of these two formats. I classify them into three types and then exact the semantic features of each type.Chapter Three is the comparative study of the objects “O” in the format “Vxiang+O” and the format “Vwang+O”. First I will illustrate that the objects “O” should not be monosyllabic. And then I have a description about the semantic features of the objects. At last I am going to make an illustration about the relationship of the formats “Vxiang+O”、“Vwang+O” with their respective objects.Chapter Four is the description of lexicalization of “Vxiang+O” and “Vwang+O”. First the paper analyses the motivation of the lexicalization of the “xiang” and “wang” and then it describes the meaning constraint of the original verbs “xiang” and “wang” in ancient Chinese over the preposition “xiang” and “wang” in modern Chinese. At last the thesis talks about the tendency of “Vxiang/wang+O” becoming predicate-object structure.Chapter Five is mainly about the types of motion in events expressed by formats “Vxiang+O” and “Vwang+O”. Firstly I will illustrate that the path schema is the cognitive model of “Vxiang/wang+O” events. Secondly we find that the “Vxiang+O”not only can express a lot of factive motions but also can express a lot of fictive motions. While the “Vwang+O” event mainly expresses factive motions and it seldom expresses fictive motions.Chapter Six is epilogue. It repeats the key research conclusion of the whole thesis and points out the defects and deficiencies in the research process.