A Syntactic And Semantic Analysis Of Prepositions With The Meaning Of Starting Point,"Cong" And "Zicong" In Modern Chinese

Chinese lacks morphological change,which means the ways of expression of its grammatical meaning mainly relies on expletive words and the order of words.The preposition system,as one part of the expletive words in Chinese,is relatively a closed set.Comparison of synonymic prepositions is an essential way of studies on Chinese prepositions.The research objects of this thesis are the most commonly used prepositions with the meaning of starting point in modern Chinese-cong and zicong.Based on previous studies,this thesis consists of a comparatively detailed analysis of cong and zicong on the synchronic level.Moreover,from the perspective of teaching Chinese as a foreign language,it also includes an investigation on the acquisition errors of international students' usage of cong and zicong.First of all,the syntactic function of cong and zicong is analyzed with the application of the structural linguistics theory and the functional linguistics theory.It points out their characteristics of semantic function,object function,syntactic function and preposition frameworks.In the next place,through the comparison of the syntax semantics and omitted rules of cong and zicong,it appears the intersection of their semantic function is the mark of the beginning time.In the aspect of syntactic structure,cong and zicong together with yilai(from the time),yihou/hou/ zhihou(afterward/later),qi(begin with),kaishi(start with)can form a preposition frame with the meaning of the starting time.The semantic function and the related preposition framework of cong are more enriched;when they are being used to refer to the mark of the starting time,their syntactic distribution is also different.Finally,based on the error analysis theory,this thesis includes a survey on international students' learn of prepositions,cong and zicong.It is found that senior international students do better than those in the intermediate grade of college.Both seniors and middle-grade students have fewer biased errors on different usages of cong and zicong and the meaning of the preposition frame.But have more biased errors on the same usage of cong and zicong and when applying the omitted rules and the bias identification.with the aspects of full understanding of the teaching syllabus and textbook,and periodic characteristic of preposition teaching,as well as the bias prediction and biased summarization,this thesis provides some teaching suggestions to solve the biased errors when using the preposition.