A Study On Word Order Of Multiple One-layer Prepositional Phrases In Modern Chinese

This paper investigates the phenomenon that a sentence in modern Chinese contains three or more prepositions or prepositional phrases,and finds that the corpus of more than three prepositional phrases is rare,mainly three prepositional phrases.In terms of word order,prepositional phrases can be divided into two categories according to the distribution of prepositional phrases before and after the predicate verb(1)"P1+P2+P3+V" and(2)"P1+P2+V+P3".At the semantic level,according to the semantic type of the object,prepositions are divided into five categories:"environment","mode","cause","receiving" and " object".It is found that there is a significant difference between the distribution of prepositional structures in the three prepositional sentences and that of single prepositions:there are only four prepositions before the subject,namely "cong(从)","zicong(自从)","zai(在)" and "dang(当)";Prepositions between subject and predicate account for the highest proportion;few after the predicate;among the 56 prepositions counted,28 prepositions with fixed syntactic position accounted for 50%of the total,while 11 prepositions with unfixed syntactic position accounted for 19.9%of the total,and the rest prepositions did not appear in the three prepositional sentences.But no matter what structure prepositions are in,there are some common rules:(a)time class>place class>direction class,(b)and thing class>object class,(c)material class>basis class>method class,(d)starting time>time,(e)place>starting place/through point place>end place,(f)starting direction>end direction,(g)abstract range>specific range.In the specific structure,"P1+P2+P3+V" and "P1+P2+V+P3" have each rules.We hold that the order of multiple prepositional phrases in a sentence is not arbitrary,but has general regularity,and human cognitive experience is often mapped to language structure.The temporal order principle,semantic range principle,graphic-background principle,syllable principle,semantic proximity principle and some conventional language habits in Chinese restrict the word order of prepositional phrases.In this paper,the linguistic phenomena of multiple prepositional phrases are explained by applying relevant linguistic theories.