Research On Mental State Verbs In "the Story Of Marriage In Reawaken World"

Mental state verbs are a small group of verbs that express people's "mental" activities. The concept of mental state verb was brought forward in Ma's Grammar by Ma Jianzhong in 1898. Hereafter, with the efforts of many grammatists, mental state verbs had become a very important part in verbs and much attention had been paid to the research of mental state verbs. Especially in the past decade, with the development of new grammatical theories and increased communication, the research of mental state verbs has reached a new level and a series of research achievements has been made in theories and systematic research. These achievement range from the initial identification of mental state verbs to the analysis of syntactic, grammatical, cognitive and valent feature etc. And the research level is still developing in every aspect.Despite these efforts, there are still many questions to be researched and clarified. For example, different schools of thoughts haven't researched agreement on the identification and classification of mental state verbs. As a result, there is still room for the research on mental state verbs.This thesis takes the mental state verbs in The Story of Marriage in Reawaken World as research object and descriptive and comparative methods in linguistics as the means of analysis. After exhaustive search, this thesis sums up 302 mental state verbs and has done detailed description and analysis by systemic argument. The thesis adopts comparative method in comparing mental state verbs in modern and ancient Chinese language. Through comparing identification, quantity, classification, grammatical and semantic features, the lexical meaning and grammatical function of these verbs are described and analyzed one by one. In the course of analysis, we found that mental verbs as an untypical member in verbs, always connected with people's mental activities, and some of them can be modified by the adverbs of degree and have the features of adjective. This thesis reclassified the mental verbs by semantic level and syntactic features. First, according to semantic features, mental state verbs can be divided into temper, emotion, cognition, apperception, conation and causation. Through the analysis of these six groups of verbs' syntactic features, the thesis shows that the function as verbs grows gradually in these six groups while the interior level gradually weaken, meanwhile, the more complicated the syntactic features are. It shows Chinese mental verbs have transition character as from showing simple mental feeling evolved to the active thinking and cognitive of the outside world.Meanwhile, as "The Story of Marriage in Reawaken World" is a magnum opus on mental state verbs in neoteric Chinese language, in order to do better research on the subject, the one syllable mental state verbs which have distinctive feature of neoteric Chinese language are demonstrated and analyzed in detail in the thesis. The analysis includes its quantity, category and sentence type. In order to probe into the development trend of mental state verbs in neoteric Chinese language, this thesis compared mental state verbs in The Story of Marriage in Reawaken World and mental verbs in morden chinaese in the latter part. It shows that the feature is the exuberance in meaning and bisyllablization in voice. In the last part of the thesis, the characteristics of mental state verbs in its development has been summarized, that is inheritance, synonymy simplification and bisyllablization, which illustrates the usage of mental state verbs during the specifically historical period, the last part of Ming Dynasty, both macroscopically and microcosmically. It revealed in some aspect the grammatical feature of neoteric Chinese language and proves the historical trend of the gradual development and evolution from neoteric Chinese language to modem Chinese language.