A Study Of The Accompanying Category In Modern Chinese

In Chinese language,the representation of comitative category can be found at different linguistic levels.It is not only the reflection of objective time in language,but also the expression of human cognitive selection.From static and dynamic perspective and with the method of multi-angle verification integrating semantics,syntax and cognition,the paper reviews the nature,classification and representation of comitative category in Chinese,describing its syntactic distributions and semantic characteristics,discussing its forming process,mechanism and motivation,and contrasting the syntactic differences in comitative category between Chinese and Spanish.The full paper consists of 9 chapters.Chapter 1 is an introduction,combing and commenting the research status of the comitative category at home and abroad,affirming the research value,and proposing the research configuration and perspectives.Chapter 2 defines the connotation and extension of the comitative category.After proposing a tentative definition of comitative category and summarizing its nature and characteristics,the paper classifies comitative category,briefly describes its syntactic representations,and establishes relation with,as well as differentiation from,the similar linguistic phenomena.On such basis,the author affirms the research significance of “event” and “event words” for the description of comitative category,clarifying the definition of “event”,differentiating its semantic types,and ascertaining the nature of “event word” on the basis of distributions pattern of Chinese word class.Chapter 3 describes the representation of comitative category at the word level by taking comitative verbs “x sui”as an example.Syntactic description and semantic analyses are made on three “x sui” words,i.e.“bansui”,“gensui”,and “zhuisui”.And then a cognitive explanation was made about their similarities and differences,which was attributed to the inner subjectivity of the verbs,the degree of animacy and willpower of the following nouns,and the mutual selection between the verbs and nouns.Chapter 4 reviews the representation of comitative category at the sentence level,defining the term of “clause”,setting the research scope,and classifying the clauses according to their syntactic status.The author provides a tentative description and analysis,syntactically and semantically,of the clauses which display comitative relationships,summarizing the clause features,and analyzing the forming mechanisms of comitative category at the sentence level: desententialization and comitative marks.Based on the clarification of the concept of “desententialization”,its reference objects and the feature of its degrading,the author summarizes the phenomena of desententialization in comitative category,proposing that the degraded clause usually represents accompanying events,and that the marks used at the sentence level mainly include comitative prepositions,comitative verbs,comitative frameworks and comitative marks with the meaning derived from specific structures.Chapter 5 studies the expressions of comitative category at the inter-sentence level.The discourse containing comitative relations gives priority to the audience perspective,which enriches the representation patterns of comitative events.The judgment of comitative relations in the discourse depends on the narrative perspective.In addition,the switching of narrative perspective involves the change of the sentence topics.Therefore,it is necessary to clarify the connotation and extension of the topic as well as the topic chain.The author examines the way of introducing and selecting the topic of expressing single object comitative relations and those of multiple objects,summarizing the features of the sentence topics marking comitative relations.Then,the author examines the corresponding relations between comitative category and rhetorical structure.The expositional relations,parallelism relations and contextual relations are the main rhetorical structures which can express comitative relations.In this chapter,analyses are also made on the forming mechanisms of comitative category at the inter-sentence level: desententialization,the use of comitative marks and the adjustment sentence order.The desententialization results mainly in null subject clauses and sub-topic clauses.The comitative marks at inter-sentence level consist of comitative object marks and comitative event marks,which,under certain conditions,will overlap each other.Through study,it is found that the progressive relation and the parallel relation,in traditional compound sentence,are the typical logical-semantic relation expressing comitative relations.As for sentence order,“comitative event precedes primary event” is the regular order,and “comitative event follows primary event” is the irregular order.Chapter 6 discusses the conventionalization process of comitative category.With the clarification of the term“conventionalization”,the author makes a description and summary of the conventionalization process of comitative event relations and comitative object relations,arguing that both of them experience the evolution from discourse to syntax,then to lexicalization,showing a series of syntactic and semantic features,due to the stability of the sentence order,high frequency of use,as well as the integrated effect of separateness motivation and the complexity motivation.The mechanism of conventionalization consists of reanalysis and analogy.Chapter 7 is the comparative study of comitative category between Chinese and Spanish.Drawing on the previous research of Chinese comitative category,the author examines the Spanish syntactical means to express comitative event relations and comitative object relations.By comparison,the author finds that,both in Chinese and Spanish,comitative relations can be expressed through the adjustment of sentence order,desententialization,comitative marks,etc.However,the use of desententialization and sentence order in Spanish is more flexible and changeable than in Chinese.Chapter 8 is devoted to the linguistic interpretation of the forming mechanism of comitative category,which consists of desententialization,comitative marks and sentence order.Desententialization can serve the function of cohesion to make a discourse coherent.Comitative marks are mainly distributed on both ends of comitative events.If located on the left end,the marks not just express the comitative relations,but also comitative events,which,during the cognitive process,exemplify a simple network of conceptual blending.If located on the right end,the marks only fulfil the mark function,which exemplify a double-scope network of conceptual blending.In terms of the sentence order,the regular one mainly observes the‘Background-Foreground Principle(BFP)'.BFP is also the underlying factor that introduces complement clauses into the embedded clauses,and that contributes to the regular distribution of the aspect markers.Regular sentence order is the observation of order iconicity,while irregular order is the imitation of mark iconicity.Chapter 9 is the conclusion.The author summarizes the main research results,illustrates the innovation and defects of this paper,and orientate the research objects of the following stage.