A Formal Semantic Analysis Of Chinese Mutual Participation Construction

Take Serial Verb Construction(???)and Pivotal Construction(???)as the references,this thesis observed and studied the semantic connotations of Chinese Mutual Participation Construction(???)firstly in the view of prototype theory.Then,analyzed this construction with logical tools such as logical predicate method and Combinatory Categorial Grammar(CCG).This thesis is divided into seven chapters.Chapter one is a literature review mainly on the research status of Chinese Conjunction Predicate Structure(????).Based on this review,we chose Chinese Mutual Participation Construction as the research object of this thesis,and aiming at describing its semantic connotations.In chapter two,we try to define the grammatical status of Chinese Mutual Participation Construction.For the the most prominent semantic feature of Participation Construction could be expressed as“common agents”(????),which is different from“continuous agents”(????)of Serial Verb Construction or“caused agents”(????)of Pivotal Construction.Therefore,we insist that Chinese Mutual Participation Construction should be treated as a separate sentence pattern from Serial Verb Construction and Pivotal Construction.Then,we pointed out the theoretical values and actual benefits of this treatment scheme.Chapter three aimed at the accurate interpretation of the empty category in the logical form of Mutual Participation Construction,which is referred to as PRO.In this part,we reference control theory which established by Chomsky,but did not limited to its established theory frame.We insisted that the accurate interpretation of PRO in Mutual Participation Construction is “N0&N1”.Obviously,such a treatment for the interpretation of PRO has never be mentioned in Chomsky's control theory,while we believe that it is more suitable to Chinese language.Chapter four is mainly about the classification of Mutual Participation.Firstly,wepointed out the shortages of present classification which just based on the semantic features of V1.Then,we divided Mutual Participation into three types and nine forms according to new standard.At last,we described and explained the continuous relationships between each types or forms or construction categories under the view of prototype theory.Chapter five and six are the core part of this thesis,which carrying out semantic analysis with mathematical logical tools.In chapter five,in order to get the relevant semantic expressions,we use logical predicate method to describe(or translate)the semantic connotations of Mutual Participation.And chapter six,we firstly made a comparison between the processing scheme of control theory,construction grammar and CCG.Then,we chose the scheme of CCG,and improved CCG?which added an anaphoric reference operator “?”,to parsing the syntactic-semantic deduction process.Chapter seven,the conclusion of this thesis,including two parts.One is the summing-up of the achievements,and the other is the remained remained issues which are related to this study.On the whole,this thesis did a deep study on Chinese Mutual Participation Construction from both the views of cognitive and logical.This work would be useful to the subsequent studies in theory,and beneficial to the works of Chinese-teaching,translation and information processing in practice.