A Syntactic, Semantic And Cognitive Approach To Directional Structure

Directional structure is a special syntactic structure in modern Chinese and there is no counterpart in foreign languages. The exploration of its property, usage and sense has been attached more importance in the grammatical field. Based on the detailed semantic and syntactic description of directional structure, this thesis explores the deep causes of its syntactic conformation from a cognitive and pragmatic perspective.This dissertation is made up of four parts, ended with a conclusion and preceded by an introduction which gives an account of the status and the research sense of directional structure in modern Chinese, the research method, the theoretical basis and the corpus source. The first part offers a brief review to directional structure synchronically, and makes an exploration of its syllable, function, distribution as well as ideation centering on the argument of its parts of speech. The second part studies directional structure in detail approached from a semantic and syntactic angle.On the base of a holistic cognitive analysis of directional verbs, the third part specifically analyzes the non-representative directional word"kai"(the Chinese character"开") and the reason why there is no"qiqu"(the Chinese characters"起去") in the directional word system of modern Chinese from a cognitive perspective.The fourth part analyzes directional structure with relative theories in cognitive linguistics and pragmatics, and expounds the effective mechanism of"distance iconicity principle","time iconicity principle"and"linearity increment principle"et al in different directional structures.