Analysis Of The Subjectification Of Left Movement In Modern Chinese

As an analytical language,Chinese is devoid of grammatical inflections and relies much on constituent order which plays a quite important role in constructing sentences and expressing meanings.In spite of some disputes,it is widely accepted that the canonical syntactic constituent order in modern Chinese is realized as “SVO” with the semantic meaning of the agent working on the patient.However,the language phenomenon of left movement which breaks the typical constituent order also abounds in modern Chinese,and it is frequently spotted in several types of sentences including “ba” construction,middle construction,inverted causative construction,topicalization and left dislocation,attracting wide attention from scholars.Previous researches on left movement are fruitful with the attention mainly focused on specific descriptions and analyses of a certain type of sentence,and scholars failed to analyze the commonality of these sentences.With the development of cognitive linguistics,scholars began to study the subjectivity and subjectification of languages,and they focused on lexical words,tense and modality with the change of word order rarely covered.Subjectivity refers to the property of language which is related to the speaker's imprint of self in his utterances,while subjectification concerns the structures and strategies that the speaker uses to realize his aspects,perspective and epistemic stance and it is also about the process of language evolution.By comparing sentences before and after left movement,this paper finds that these sentences share the obvious tendency of going through the process of subjectification.In fact,subjectivity in sentences after left movement is profiled.Through detailed and careful analyses of “ba” construction,middle construction,inverted causative construction,topicalization and left dislocation,based on construal theory,this paper has reached the following conclusions: 1)by shifting perspectives,different constituents in sentences are figured accordingly after left movement;2)by reorganizing the roles different syntactic and semantic constituents play in the event,the speaker offers a new construal after left movement;3)the subjectivity in sentences after movement has become prominent,indicating the speaker's affect,attitude and epistemic modality;4)the feature of the sentence after left movement may change,shifting from the narration of an action to the description of certain characteristics.Compared with scattered studies on left movement by the predecessors,this paper makes a systematic and comprehensive discussion on five types of sentences with left movement under a unified perspective of subjectification,and analyzes the motivation of the subjectivity under the approach of cognitive linguistics,which provides a new angle for the study of leftmovement in the future and enriches the study of subjectification.