A Study On Sentence Accomplishment Conditions In Modern Chinese

This paper introduces information structure as an independent analytical level of sentence construction, thus making the contextual and pragmatic factors included in the structure of sentence and explaining the essentially same behavior of self-sufficient sentences and non-self-sufficient sentences to achieve their communicational function. With synthesis and analysis of different kinds of structures put to the sentence test, the author tries to prove that it requires at least one proposition structure and one reference point structure with proper depth of field to complete a sentence. The paper consists of 5 chapters.Chapter 1 briefly introduces the development of understanding of Chinese sentence in previous researches, the author points out that it is of deepening significance to study the subject of sentence accomplishment conditions. The focus of this chapter is comment on the achievements and shortages of the former studies, providing a theoretical basis for our following study.Chapter 2 explains in detail the term "information structure", "proposition structure", "reference point structure" and "depth of field", and proposes a hypothesis of sentence accomplishment conditions, i.e. it takes a proposition structure and a preference point structure, which governs the former one, to establish a sentence. The author assumes that the contextual information has two sentence accomplishment functions, which are suppling functions and explaining functions, and two sentence accomplishment patterns, which are information prominent on the scene and information accessible in the mind.Chapter 3 analyses the sentence accomplishment conditions of typical subject-predicate structures and points out the key to meet the conditions is to achieve the judgment relationship between the subject and the predicate. The emphasis of this part is to prove that the noun-predicate structures, the adjective-predicate structures and the verb-predicate structures all need to establish a sentence either in direct judgment pattern or non-direct judgment pattern, this finding is essentially in conformity with the our hypothesis.Chapter 4 analyses the sentence accomplishment conditions of non-typical subject-predicate structures, noun structures, and verb structures. By demonstrating how the structures become sentences, we can also confirm our hypothesis.Chapter 5 summarizes the main findings in the above’chapters and points out the defects and problems for further research.