A Typological Research Of Reciprocal Constructions In Sino-Tibetan Languages

As a kind of universal language phenomenon which is widely used in world languages,reciprocal construction has attracted many linguists' attention at home and abroad.Though there are quite a few researches about the reciprocal constructions,but it is rare to find the typological investigation between Mandarin and other minorities languages.Therefore,this thesis aims to explore the different expression manners of reciprocal constructions in Mandarin,Miao and Tibeto-Burman languages,and explain their similarities and differences.This thesis investigates the different expressing manners of reciprocal constructions from the perspective of typology.The reciprocal construction is the syntactic construction that contains symmetric predicates,and the arguments possess the relation of addition and combination.The reciprocal construction is widespread in the languages all over the world,but each language has its own unique representations to express reciprocity,such as syntactic,lexical and morphological ways.Sino-Tibetan languages are the second languages in the world,ranking only second to Indo-European languages.Mandarin,Miao language and Tibeto-Burman languages are the members of Sino-Tibetan language family.It is reported that they all have the same origin,but they have different ways of expressing reciprocity.Based on this idea and former studies,this thesis places its stress on the following research questions:(1)According to the typology of reciprocal construction,what are the strategies of the reciprocal constructions in Mandarin and other minority languages?How to account for the parametric variation?(2)what is the morpheme-syntactic account of reciprocal representations in these languages?(3)What is the relation between the comitative case and reciprocal constructions in these languages? what are the similarities and differences?Through analyzing former researches about binding theory and typological theory,and comparing linguistic data from these languages,we find the answers to those questions,which can be presented as follows:(1)As for the strategy of reciprocal coding manners,Mandarin mainly uses the compound strategy,which is realized by verb coding;Miao language is the synthetic strategy,which is realized by the special prefix;Tibeto-Burman languages can be counted as compound strategy in combination with synthetic strategy,for the sake of its various coding manners.(2)There exists the phenomenon of argument reduction in these languages when the reciprocal morphemes attached to the verb stem.The process of syntactic movement and the motivation in these three languages are roughly the same,while there issome discrepancy in terms of the different language structures and morpheme positions.(3)As for the relation between the comitative case and reciprocal constructions,in Mandarin,the comitative case and reciprocal construction can't appear in the same sentence;in Tibeto-Burman languages,the comitative case and reciprocal constructions can occur together.In the end,this thesis offers the explanations of the differences and similarities of reciprocal representations among these languages.Language type,word order and language contact all can be considered as the factors.This thesis investigates the reciprocal constructions in Mandarin,Miao language and Tibeto-Burman languages,and gives exhaustive explanations of the variations from syntax.It facilitates the better understanding of reciprocal constructions among languages and gives us some enlightenment of the linguistic diversity.