The Study Of Syntactic And Semantic Features Of English And Chinese Generic Sentences

As a prevalent linguistic phenomenon,generic sentences have attracted many domestic and overseas scholars' interests and are widely studied since the 1970s.Up to now,the majority of studies on generics has concentrated on formal semantic analysis and interpretations which are valuable but hard to be undisputed and also ignore the interaction between language and human thinking.Besides,the studies on Chinese generics are insufficient and no systematic study on both English and Chinese generic sentences is conducted.This thesis,based on cognitive theories,tries to make a systematic description and interpretation on the syntactic and semantic features of English and Chinese generics,and it also further studies on the exception-tolerance phenomenon and discloses the design feature of generic sentences-virtuality.Guided by the theory of categorization and virtuality in language,it is proposed that generics,mainly formed by subject-predicate structure,are unbounded.The major subject forms are bare noun phrases,definite singulars and indefinite singulars.They should be collocated with individual-level predicates and reject stage-level predicates and numeral modifiers.Corresponding to definite singulars,zhe + N construction expresses topicalization,mainly appearing in oral language and conveying subjective attitudes and affections.The yi + classifier +N structure,paralleling to indefinite singulars,is initiated by the INDIVIDUAL FOR CLASS metonymy mechanism.Besides,due to the feature of individuality,it is more constrained and the subjects should be of high animacy.Since the English definite singulars and indefinite singulars are grammaticalized in a higher degree,compared with Chinese counterparts,they are less constrained.In terms of their essence,based on embodied experience and encyclopedia knowledge,generic sentences are derived from human categorization.They involve subjective generalization of the shared properties according to related cognitive domains.They refer to a virtual type in human mind rather than the individuals in the actual plane.Therefore,generics can tolerate exceptions and present the semantic features,like unboundedness.