On The Indeterminacy Of The Word Classes Of Chinese Four-character Idioms And The Spatiality Of Their Internal Structures

Chinese word classes are the key to the study of Chinese grammar.For a long time,the study of them has mainly focused on the two core issues:"the standard or basis of word classification" and "the relationship between words and grammatical components." The crux of the study is that Chinese does not possess morphological markers or morphological changes that can be employed to classify words.Therefore,it is difficult for us to distinguish word classes in accordance with word forms.Moreover,there exists such a complex relationship between Chinese word classes and grammatical components that we have great difficulties in delineating the attribution of grammatical categories of Chinese words.Therefore,the characteristic that the Chinese language has can tell that its word classes can only be classified according to their grammatical functions.The word classes of Chinese would become hard to tell without the specific sentence in which words are used.The word classes of Chinese disyllabic words are also uncertain and need to be determined in conformity to their specific grammatical functions.The function of four-character idioms in Chinese is something just like that of Chinese words,and there is homogeneity of them,i.e.their word classes should be judged by their grammatical functions in the sentences they show up.Based on the indeterminacy of the,word classes of Chinese disyllabic words,the present paper aims to concentrate on Chinese four-character idioms by analysing their internal structures,investigating their grammatical functions,and revealing the essential features of the Chinese language reflected by the word classes of these idioms.What has been observed in this thesis is that there really exists homogeneity of Chinese four-character idioms and Chinese disyllabic words in terms of their word classes,i.e.their word classes can only be told in line with their grammatical functions.The grammatical distribution of four-character idioms are very flexible,and thus there are no rules that can be framed.They can be viewed as a microcosm of the whole Chinese grammatical system,since almost all complex grammatical structural relationships in Chinese can be found w ithin the four-character idioms which are concise in form,rich in meaning and rather sophisticated in inner structure.The overall effect of a four-character idiom is very often greater than the sum of its individual parts.Moreover,the internal composition and overall application of Chinese four-character idioms could manifest the spatial trait of the Chinese language to a large extent,which can be characterized by their chunkiness and discreteness.Their chunkiness can be demonstrated by their inner components being orderly spreading,parallel combined and chunkily integrated when they are componentially analyzed,and being independently lumpy,relatively juxtaposed and flexibly disconnected while used as a whole in a sentence.Their discreteness can be demonstrated by the feature of elasticity:being separable,insertable.order-exchangeable and substitutable.The chunkiness and the discreteness of Chinese four-character idioms actually accommodate each other and interact with each other as both cause and effect,thereby making the trait of the spatiality of Chinese rather conspicuous.