A Functional Study On The Syntactic And Semantic Performance Of Mirror Expressions In Modern Chinese-from Subjectivity Perspective

Modern Chinese contains a large body of elements that can swap around acertain reference center, such as “Ta zai chuangshang tangzhe (On the bed he islying)” and “Ta tang zai chuangshang(He is lying on the bed)”,“duo geile(toomuch has been given)” and “gei duole(has given too much)”(herein the phrase“zai chuangshang” switches around “tang”, the reference center, and duo aroundgei), We call these elements “mirror elements” or “mirror expressions” as theyhave two possible positional variants and thus form a mirror image to each other. Therather unwieldy number of these mirror expressions in modern Chinese crosscutdifferent grammatical categories such as locative phrases, qualitative phrases,negatives and clauses. This makes it a good enough reason for us to make an attemptto find out the cognitive principle that can ultimately account for all these phenomena.With Langacker’s synchronic model of subjectivity as rationale, complementedby mental space and pragmatic theory, especially Traugott’s diachronic paradiagm onsubjectification, the current study centers on the subjectivity differences of thesemirror expressions when positioned at alternate places, aiming to find out their sharedcognitive mechanism, and to shed light on their semantic and syntactic implications.As a speech event usually comprises three elements,1) speech participants, i.e.,speaker and addressee(s),2) the speech setting, i.e., the place, time, and circumstancesin which the speech event takes place, and3) speech proper, i.e., the linguisticexpression itself, any predication should therefore have an entity as its target to bepredicated upon. This entity can either be an object in the external world andmaterialized as a sentence argument or relation, or the speaker themselves. That is tosay, an expression may in one circumstance be predicative of the concrete object inthe world, and in another predicative of the speaker. Following this line of thinking,the current study approaches the above-mentioned four mirror categories to see whatentity they are predicative of at mirroring positions, which can then be taken asevidence for their subjectivity or objectivity. By so doing, we can give a thorough analysis and explanation of the mirror expressions’ semantic and syntactic variation.The study proves that the four kinds of mirror expressions, taken as a whole, arepredicative of the concrete objects or relations in the external world (which usuallyare realized as sentence elements) when positioned at the right side of the referencecenter, and the speaker (or take the speaker as the conceptual reference for predicatingother objects) when at the left. The right position accords the mirror expressions witha concrete content meaning which is mainly for referring and describing an objectivething or relation specified in the sentence itself, whereas the left position is capable ofimposing an abstract meaning on, and thus the speaker’s expressive connotation of,the position-shifted expressions, making them more reflective of the speaker’sperspective in viewing the scene. Therefore, the mirror expressions are moresubjective at the left side of the reference center (left positioning) than at the right side(right positioning). In line with Langacker’s “grounding” model, the paper claimsthat the left positioning specifies people’s domain-in viewing, thus more subjective;while the right positioning shows speaker’s domain-out viewing, thus more objective.This is what the four kinds of mirror expressions have in common.Chapter3discusses the mirroring phenomena of locative phrases, with“zai(at)+locative noun” and “xiang(towards)+locative noun” as typicalconstructions. As the locative constructions usually appear in a motion event, whichalways reflects a locutionary agent’s advantage point in viewing it, the paper thusdistinguishes two kinds of viewing perspectives, that is, the domain-in anddomain-out perspectives, and within each viewing perspective are the two ways ofviewing strategy, i.e., the “core-out” strategy and the “out-in”strategy1. Thisclassification actually can accomodate all uses of “zai+locative noun”constructions and, accordingly, their meaning differences at the alternate positions(hence pre-verb construction and post-verb construction) can be explained in terms ofthe parameters of “process”,“perfective”,“causative” for the verb, and“boundedness” and “adhesiveness” for the arguments. Besides, the pre-verb construction also bears other special characteristics, such as being focused on with thehelp of additional adverbial particles, showing a speaker’s empathy, and having alow degree of transitivity, which are in contrast with post-verb constructions. On thediscourse level, the sentence following the pre-verb construction is mostly the furtherdevelopment of the action expressed by the verb (the reference center), and thesentence coming after the post-verb construction denotes a new action taking place atthat location.Construction “xiang+locative noun” also shows similar qualities with that of“zai+locative noun”. The pre-verb and post-verb constructions also showdifferences in the dimensions of “movement”,“direction”,“touchability”,“syllabic length”,“time stretch” and “speaker-reference”.Chapter4examines the mirroring expressions of qualitative phrases, especiallythe switching between “adverbials” and “attributives”, and that between“adverbials” and “complements”. In the mirror image between “adverbials”and “attributives”, the adverbial qualitatives gain a prominent cognitive positionfor speaker, therefore more subjective, while the attributive qualitatives merelymodify their head nouns, without any salience in itself, therefore objective. This leadsto their differences on the constructional meaning, with the adverbial qualitativesfocusing mainly on their salience for the speaker at the speech event, which is whatthe attributive qualitatives lack. The adverbial position (i.e., pre-verb position)demands some implicit morphological and semantic requirements for thosequalitatives that would appear in this position; however, with its subjective character,some poorly-made adverbial qualitatives can also meet these constructionalrequirements by some explicit sentential operations. The subjectivity differencebetween adverbials and attributives can help us account for their differences in thepredicate and object structure, aspect character, interrogating and negating variance,etc.The switching between “adverbials” and “complements” also shows thatthe adverbials qualitatives are predicative of the speaker while the complements are predicative of the objective situation. This results in their differences in themorphological structures, quantitative characters, syntax and emotional dimensions.Chapter5expounds the subjectivity of negatives “bu” and “mei(you)”, aswell as their potential to appear at different positions. It was proved that “mei(you)”,with its space-building character and explicit attention to the attitude and cognitivestatus of addressee(s), gains more and more (inter)subjectivity than “bu”, whichpays more attention to the lack of a certain quality by the topic referent.“Mei(you)”,therefore, can act as downtoner showing a speaker’s politeness in negating and amove toward making cognitive alignment with the interlocutor. While in negating aviewpoint,“mei(you)” tends to be more likely to make a coherent discourse than“bu”, which, with its low degree of subjectivity, shows the potential to undergofuther subjectification by moving from complement position to main clause position,a movement which “mei(you)” lacks, for it has achieved extreme subjectification,any moving toward the left main clause would make meaning superfluous.Chapter6studies the shifting phenomena of adverbial clauses. It demonstratesthat the adverbial clauses preceding the main clauses (i.e., initial clauses) are differentfrom their counterparts following the main clauses (i.e., final clauses) in terms of sixparameters. The initial clauses are characterized by1) their allowance of onlydeclarative sentences;2) not to be taken as sentence focus;3) being harmonious withsubjective discourse markers,4) not to be included within the illocutionary force ofmain clauses,5)the optional characteristics of its pre-clause conjunctions, and6) theirbeing able to be fleshed out by further information. All these parameters make theinitial clauses distinct constructions that show the cognitive coordination between thespeaker and addressee, thus being able to function as discourse organizer, while thefinal clauses only have local function to provide further information for the precedingmain clauses. In other words, the initial clauses are predicative of the speaker andaddressee(s), while the final clauses are predicative of the preceding main clauses.This finding is verified by a case study of causal clauses. As there are mainly threecausal connectives in Chinese,“Yinwei”,“Jiran” and “Youyu”, they show quite different distributional patterns when marking clauses. Clauses introduced byconjunctions “yinwei” and “jiran” can appear sentence-initially and finally,while clauses marked by “youyu” can only appear sentence-initially. Thisphenomenon is motivated by their semantic differences and the characteristics thethree linkers bear in encoding the “Ground”. It is proved that “yinwei” explicitlyencodes the speaker himself,“youyu” implicitly encodes the speaker and addressee,and “jiran” is the explicit encoding of the speaker and addressee. Therefore, inaccordance with Traugott’s subjectification theory and Langacker’s subjectivity theory,“youyu” has the highest degree of subjectivity, which is followed by “jiran”,with “yinwei” the lowest degree of subjectivity. This can explain their varyingperformance and frequency in the initial and final positions of sentences.It is based on the analysis of the afore-mentioned four mirror expressions that thepaper comes to the conclusion that the left-positioning expressions are moresubjective than their right-positioning counterparts. This finding can give a systematicexplanation to the semantic and syntactic variants of these mirror expressions. Themotivation behind these expressions is the mytonymic cognition in that the part isused to stand for the whole within a scene, for the diachronic development of somemirror expressions show that the subjective uses (domain-in viewing) come after theobjective meaning (domain-out viewing). As was hypothesized by Adamson(2000)and Traugott (2010) that the subjectified elements tend to move towards the leftperiphery of a sentence in VO languages and right in OV languages, theabove-analyzed mirroring expressions prove once again that the modern Chinese is atypical VO language with strong subjectivity.