A Study On The Semantic Category Of Appearing-and-Disappearing Events In Chinese

The appearance and disappearance of people and things are called appearing-and-disappearing events,which are basic events in the objective world.When people choose to express the these events by language,they will be realized from the primary experience into a discourse form composed of many symbols.The process of the primary experience to generate the referential meaning of the final discourse form is the core issue of our research.This research takes a new path and starts from the semantic category of the appearing-and-disappearing event to find the discourse that can express the event and explore the dynamic process of discourse generation.Previous studies mainly focus on the discussion of existential sentences,and the research results are quite plentiful.The description and explanation from the form have been very detailed,which has laid the foundation for our research.However,there are three problems in the previous studies that need to be further explored.First,the sentence expressing appearing-and-disappearing has not become an independent research object,but is taken as a category of the existing sentence together with the existing sentence.Second,the study starts from the form,only the sentences that conform to the construction are studied,and other sentences that can express appearing-and-disappearing which do not conform to the construction are excluded.Third,the definition of "appearing-and-disappearing" is not clear in some researches.The research starting from the construction has been very complete,it is difficult to achieve research findings of the predecessors,and the remaining problems are still difficult to solve if we follow this way.Therefore,our research has further discussed the above three major problems,and determined our research path as "starting from the semantic and mapping the form".The semantic category of appearing-and-disappearing events is established from the semantic standpoint,and the whole category of events includes three levels:concept level,language level and discourse level.From the conceptual level,we first determine the basic concept of semantic category of these events as "the people or things appear or disappear in a reference space",and then define "a boundary" of the event category: only the events whose appearing-and-disappearing meaning is main are studied,excluding the production events and damage events which contain appearing-and-disappearing meaning.Secondly,by observing the process and structure of the event,it has "three characteristics" : instantaneity,dynamicity and variability.Finally,we found "four elements" that constitute the semantic category schema of the event: "subject"," action"," space" and " time",the subject and action elements are the core elements of the event.At the linguistic level,our study only deals with verbs.The linguistic representation form of semantic category of event is the verbs expressing appearing-and-disappearing.Since verbs can express temporal processes,the category of symbols representing events as a whole is "verb".Similarly,the linguistic representation form of semantic category of event is "appearing-and-disappearing verb".we found 115 verbs that can represent these events,and the main members are I& II unaccusative verbs that can express appearing-and-disappearing,they are divided into "appearing verbs" and "disappearing verbs" according to the type of events."Emerging verbs" can be divided into two categories according to whether new things are produced.The first category "emerging verbs" includes 58 verbs: "emerging verbs","emerging verbs","occurring verbs","producing verbs","growing verbs" and "damaging verbs".The second category of "transfer verbs" includes 15 verbs : "transfer verbs" and "add verbs".There are 42 "disappearing verbs",which can be divided into "extincting verbs","hidden verbs","lacking verbs","running verbs" and "missing verbs" according to their semantic characteristics.There are three problems studied at the discourse level.First,the expression of each element of the event schema.We have studied the action,time,space and subject elements,and the research of action and time elements is the focus.The expression form of the action is related to the "aspect" of the event,and there are two forms of "verb+directional verb" and "verb + tense-aspect marker".tense-aspect marker is a way to observe events from the inside for communicators,which can interpret the event and reconstruct its time structure by a time cognition window.Different "windows" have different tense-aspect characteristics.The appearing-and-disappearing event was originally an instantaneous and heterogeneous event,and the observing method of marking "Le" and "Guo" can highlight the structural characteristics of the original event itself,while the continuous marks "Zhe" and "Zai" to rebuild the event time structure,and the projecting of the event into the time cognition window needs to highlight the time-sustain."Zhe" is a marker of homogeneous persistence,which reconstructs the original event structure into "discontinuous homogeneous persistence structure".The occurrence of events tends to co-appear with "Zhe" to express "homogeneous persistence",but "Zhe" does not express tense,and the occurrence of event expression is often time positioned for events through subsequent clauses."Zai" is also a simultaneous function of the persistence marker,which can reconstruct the original structure of the event into a "discontinuous persistence structure" and position it on the external timeline.It can also constitute the duration segment of the disappearing event and the damaged event and position it on the timeline.The disappearing event tendency and "Zai" co-appear to express the "growth persistence".Appearing-and-disappearing events co-occur most often with markers,so events tend to choose markers that highlight the nature of the event’s time structure over markers that alter the nature of the event’s time structure.The discourse form of the time is related to the "time" of the appearing-and-disappearing event,which is the communicator’s external observation of the event.According to the position of the communicator’s observation moment on the external timeline,it can be divided into three observation perspectives:before,at and after the occurrence of the event.Different observation perspectives have different forms of discourse expression.From the view of element arrangement,we selected 31 permutations that could be used for practical communication from 39 possible forms.From the perspective of structure,it is further divided into declarative and referential forms of discourse.Third,the position and form of the event expression in the event network.In the event network,there are three main relationships between the appearing-and-disappearing event and other types of events: the former is in parallel with other events,the appearing-and-disappearing event framework is nested within the appearing-and-disappearing sub-event or other sub-events,and the other type of event framework is nested within the appearing-and-disappearing sub-event.When appearing-and-disappearing events contain other events,the expression tends to be declarative discourse form.When appearing-and-disappearing events are nested by other events,the expression tends to be referential discourse form.At the three levels of semantic category,the last part of the study is to explore how the discourse expression forms of the appearing-and-disappearing events at the level of referential reality are generated and what strategies and mechanisms are restricted by.At the conceptual level,the speaker’s extraction of event elements is restricted by the level of event generalization. generalization hierarchy the more abstract,the events to observe further,the less event factors of extraction,the elements in cognitive interaction network related are more difficult to be highlighted,and the forms of discourse elements encoding reduce the amount of information,present the highly generalization tendency,event categories is more abstractive,the low degree of concrete,and vice versa.At the language level,action elements are restricted by the type of language frame,and the expression forms of space elements and subject elements are affected by attention window and perspective strategy.At the level of discourse form,the overall structure of event expression depends on whether communicators carry out atempolization.If communicators choose to erase the temporality of events,they will tend to generate referential structure rather than declarative structure.In addition,the order of the event elements in the expression is restricted by the principle of Figure-Ground,and the ground-before-figure order is more unmarked.Finally,the presentation of event discourse forms in the text is not only influenced by the level of event generalization,but also follows the cohesion and coherence of the text content,so that the text forms an organized and hierarchical organic whole.The discourse form of the semantic category of the appearing-and-disappearing event is the result of the choice of the speaker as well as the comprehensive effect of various principles and strategies.