A Research On The Circumposition "Zai……Shang"

Circumposition is an important item of linguistic type. Based on typology theories, we further examine the definition of circumposition and study the inner nature of the circumposition. Besides, "zai……shang" as one of important type of circumpositions, that is, circumposition that express spatial relations, we will examine its syntactic features, semantic features, and its complex restrictive factors of Chinese circumpositions through the corpus survey. The main contents are as follows:The study presents the critical analysis of the preposition zai. Preposition zai has the following qualities:First of all, it has the typical properties of prepositions, that is, zai cannot stand-alone, cannot take the aspect markers, cannot change its position alone and so on. Secondly, its prepositional status depends on the properties of the NPs that are dominated by zai……shang, and also relies on the tolerance of NP. Specifically,on the one hand, if the subject and the zai NP shang cannot use alone, it shows the typical prepositional status of zai because it suggests that the subject cannot occur in the place denoted by the place NP shang;on the other hand, if the NP can allow that the subject occurs in the place expressed by NP shang, it shows the atypical prepositional status of zai. Thirdly, zai is closely related to the following noun phrase instead of the preceding verb. This fact suggests that zai cannot form a compound verb with preceding verb, insteads, zai NP shang functions as the complement of the verb. This dissertation also offers a systematic and critical assessment of postpositional analysis of shang. We argue that that the postpositional analysis and circumposition analysis may provide a more reasonable and satisfying answer for the characteristics of monosyllabic locative particles. Monosyllabic locative particles have the following qualities, that is, cannot stand alone and occurring in the following position of NP or VP, and expressing locative information. Meanwhile, they always co-occur with prepositions, which later allow them to form circumpositions.Besides, we try to define the circumposition more properly. Through studying the circumposition, we define the circumposition more strictly. We analyze in more detail about the syntax distributions, syntactic domains, semantic features and redundancy of circumposition.From the aspect of semantic redundancy and valence theory, we assume that the semantic meaning of "zai......shang" is included when people try to understand this circumposition, even if the preposition or postposition is absent. In the meantime, we examine the restrictive factors of circumpositions. They have different performances in different syntactic positions. As a matter of fact, a circumposition may show the need for mandatory, which may be restricted by the semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, rhythmic and cognitive factors. And those factors may involve with each other.