A Study On The Sentence Sentence Of "Zuozhuan"

In Chinese language study, opinions about “bounded sentences” have been reportedoccasionally, but systematic and specific research method has not yet been established. Due tothe short history of applying “bounded sentences” in grammar study, some related phenomenahaven’t been adequately explained and thus further discussion and research are needed. In thearea of ancient Chinese, there has been no systematic research into grammatical theories fromthis perspective. A study was therefore necessary to analyze and summarize the application ofbounded sentences in the grammar study. And there is certainly a need of a great deal offurther theoretical exploration in order to establish a forceful grammatical rule based on thisanalysis approach. The perspective of “bounded sentences” provides a new idea for explaininggrammatical theories and is also conducive to the teaching and practice of Chinese grammar.To determine the definition of bounded sentence in the Master Zuo’s Commentary onSpring and Autumn Annals, the paper gave an exhaustive analysis of bounded sentences in theMaster Zuo’s Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals, on the basis of existing research byancient and contemporary linguists. The nature of bounded sentences describing a completeevent in ancient Chinese and the explicit forms of their components were summarized.Moreover, the features that distinguish them from those in modern Chinese were discussed.Languages of China and western countries show obvious differences in many aspects, such asgrammatical theories, research methods, and the pattern, content and focus of analysis.Deriving a grammatical system in line with the characteristics of Chinese from linguistic factsin Chinese is a long-term and arduous task that requires tremendous efforts by Chinese peoplegeneration after generation. But we remain confident that we can achieve it in the futuredespite the difficulties. This study aimed to make a contribution to the research on boundedsentences in ancient Chinese.This paper includes the following six chapters.The first chapter “Introduction” mainly included a brief introduction and a review of thecurrent situation and existing problems in previous studies on bounded sentences. Theviewpoint of “bound” proposed by Langacker in his cognitive linguistics theory has given usmany inspirations for our understanding of the unique event structures in Chinese. Bounding,an extremely important idea in cognitive linguistics, refers to people’s bounded cognition ofobjective things embodied in their languages. Grammar is a set of rules of the mapping from event structures to sentence structures.From the perspective of word or phrase, the difference between bounded and unboundedthings is reflected in the difference between bounded and unbounded words or phrases. Andfrom the perspective of sentence, that difference is reflected in the difference between boundedand unbounded sentences. The existence of boundary can distinguish a bounded sentence froman unbounded one. This theory was employed in this chapter to outline and review existingresearch focusing on bounded and unbounded sentences from the perspectives of morphologyand syntax.In Chapter2, the definitions of bounded and unbounded sentences were derived from thelinguistic data in Master Zuo’s Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals. And some explicitformulas were put forward for easy grammatical identification of bounded sentences. Abounded sentence is an indicative initial sentence that can describe an independent real worldevent with beginning and ending points, without the support of the context of a situation.Interrogative sentences, subsequent sentences, and complex sentences were excluded. Theconstituents of a bounded sentence in ancient Chinese, which can serve as the explicitformulas for identifying bounded sentences, were discussed, including number, definiteness ofsubject, tense and aspect, telic verbs indicating the end of an event, location and orientation,and the structure of “atelic verb+telic verb”. Their roles and functions were also explained.Conversely, sentences that don’t meet the requirements stated above or fail to describe acomplete real world event are unbounded sentences. The explicit formulas for identifyingunbounded sentences, i.e. the factors affecting the establishment of unbounded sentences, werealso provided, such as non-indicative mood, non-autonomous verbs, subjective assessment,modality, progressive tense, imperfective aspect, and negation.In Chapter3, the semantic roles of bounded sentences in Master Zuo’s Commentary onSpring and Autumn Annals and their distributions were discussed. Since it’s difficult todetermine the number of semantic roles, or semantic cases, of a language, inventories ofsemantic roles provided by different scholars are quite different. Some inventories contain3~6semantic roles while others include as many as dozens of semantic roles. According to theprevious classifications and the characteristics of Master Zuo’s Commentary on Spring andAutumn Annals, a total of16semantic roles were determined from the perspective of therelationship between nominal and predicate constituents as follows: Agent, Object, Benefactor,Location, Time, Target, Dual (involving Agent and Object), Method, Instrument, Reliance,Result, Orientation, Quantity, Cause, Purpose,and Range.Using linguistic data in Master Zuo’s Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals, we explored the grammatical requirements of bounded sentences in this book from theconstituents of sentences. The semantic roles of bounded sentences in Master Zuo’sCommentary on Spring and Autumn Annals and their distributions were analyzed to identifythe kernel cases and non-kernel cases of the bounded sentences. This was intended to discoverthe concealed and deep case frame governing the establishment of bounded sentences inancient Chinese.The statistical analysis of the semantic roles indicated that Agent, Object, Location, Timeand Target made up large proportions of the bounded sentences and thus were considered asthe kernel cases, while the rest were non-kernel case. The reasons for this classification werealso presented.In the fourth chapter, the variation in the distributions of the semantic roles of boundedsentences between Master Zuo’s Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals and modernChinese was discussed. The characteristics of the distributions of the semantic roles ofbounded sentences in the Master Zuo’s Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals Chinesewere outlined. Besides, a special discussion was done to analyze the semantic roles thatdistinguished the bounded sentences in the Master Zuo’s Commentary on Spring and AutumnAnnals from those in modern Chinese as well as their distributions.The analysis and comparison suggested that the semantic roles constituting the boundedsentences in modern Chinese tend to move forward on a large scale, and prepositions arefrequently used to form adverbial phrases in front of predicates. By contrast, Location,Orientation, Instrument, Method, Cause, Purpose, Verbal Measure, and Time Measure werenormally placed behind verbs in the bounded sentence in the Master Zuo’s Commentary onSpring and Autumn Annals. The forward movement of these constituents in modern Chinesecan result in the relative backward movement of verbs or verbal structures. Thus, the kernelverbs of the bounded sentences in modern Chinese have a stronger tendency to movebackward.This chapter aimed to provide a basis for in-depth knowledge of the characteristics ofbounded sentences in the Master Zuo’s Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals and makethe construction of bounded sentences in the Master Zuo’s Commentary on Spring andAutumn Annals more applicable in linguistic typology and more comparable to otherlanguages.In Chapter5, a further discussion was conducted to demonstrate the reasons for thesyntactic variation in the distributions of the semantic roles in bounded sentences in Chinese.In Chapter1, the formation of verb-complement structure and the shift of Causative semantic frame from concentration to disintegration were discussed. In modern Chinese, theCausative semantic frame tends to be disintegrated, separating Method and Result. In thebounded sentences of Master Zuo’s Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals, Method,Cause and Result were usually integrated into a single verb. This distinction has a direct orindirect effect on Chinese syntax.In Chapter2, the reduction in the number of semantic roles following predicative verbwas discussed. In the bounded sentences of Master Zuo’s Commentary on Spring and AutumnAnnals,the semantic roles of Object, Benefactor, Target, Location, Orientation, Method,Instrument, Cause, and Purpose were all placed behind verbs so that each verb may befollowed by two or more semantic roles. But in modern Chinese, a verb must be followed byonly one semantic role, except for a few enclosed verbs that can be followed by double objects.To avoid the existence of two objects behind a verb, these sentence structures with two objectsare normally disintegrated and compensated with additional verbs or prepositions in modernChinese.Chapter3demonstrated that the derivation and evolution of prepositions have contributedto the forward movement of some semantic cases. In the bounded sentences of Master Zuo’sCommentary on Spring and Autumn Annals, prepositional phrases in bounded sentences werenormally placed behind verbs, while those are mostly placed in advance of verbs in in modernChinese.The temporality and extensity of ancient Chinese were interpreted from the perspective ofcognitive linguistics in Chapter4.In the5th and6th chapters, the reasons for the differences in the distribution ofquantitative cases were discussed.1. In the structures of “Noun+Number” and “Noun+Number+Measure”, there is noclose relationship between Quantity and Noun; in the structures of “Number+Noun” and“Number+Measure+Noun”, Quantity has a close relationship with Noun.2. The form of “Number+Verbal Measure” stresses the relationship between an actionand the result, while the form of “Verbal Measure+Number” simply indicates the quantity ofan action.3. The “Time Measure+Verb” structure is normally used to express a virtual action whilethe “Verb+Time Measure” structure is usually used to describe a real action.The sixth chapter is a summary to the full paper,It was elaborated in the conclusion theparts needed to be improved and optimized and the plan and prospect of the future study weremade.