Research Into Selective Complex Sentences In Medieval Chinese

Selective complex sentence is an important category of Chinese complex sentences system, which is used to express the selective relationship among things or situations. Research into selective complex sentences in modern Chinese has been extensively conducted and achieved fruitful results. However, research into selective complex sentences in ancient Chinese has been restricted to cohort study and specialized books research. The main research method is static description, resulting in the lack of comprehensive and diachronic study. Therefore, description and analysis of selective complex sentences in medieval Chinese, which is the transition period in the history of Chinese grammar, is very necessary and can provide some basic results for the research of complex sentences into ancient Chinese.This thesis will take representative corpus of mediaeval Chinese as the scope of research and extensively collect cases of selective complex sentences. In the meantime, this thesis will refer to theoretical achievements of modern Chinese complex sentences research and focus on description combined with analysis in order to sum up the characteristics of selective complex sentences in medieval Chinese in respects of formal marks, logical semantics and pragmatic functions.The introduction part defines the connotation and classification of selective complex sentences in medieval Chinese and clarifies the significance, research ideas and methods of this thesis based on the summary of research status of selective complex sentences.In the body of this thesis, selective complex sentences will be divided into optional type, run-off type, comparative type and limited type according to the selective relationship between clauses of selective complex sentences in medieval Chinese and the thesis will launch a detailed description of the four types of selective complex sentences. Then, combined with the logic knowledge, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of selective complex sentences in medieval Chinese will be analyzed and summarized.The conclusion part points out that formal mark, logical semantic and pragmatic characteristics of selective complex sentences in medieval Chinese have developed relatively to the full and laid the foundation of selective complex sentences in modern Chinese.