A Research On The Comparative "You/Meiyou" (有/没有) Sentences

Comparison, one of the widely used categories in linguistics, has been studied universally by linguists. The paper regards comparative"You/ Meiyou"(有/没有) sentences which are formed with"You/ Meiyou"as symbols. These two types of sentences are characteristic of Contemporary Chinese, belonging to the sub-category——equality and inferiority. Based on what has been achieved by other linguists on comparative categories, this paper mainly takes comparative sentences with"You"and"Meiyou"as the focal points, analyzing them on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels through the perspectives of synchrony and diachrony.This paper consists of five chapters altogether. Apart from the first chapter"Introduction"and the final chapter"Conclusion", the body is divided into three chapters.Chapter one is a foreword elucidating the meaning of studying this selected topic, the status of researches, the linguistic method adopted in this paper and the reason to do so, the sources of the examples and some existing difficulties.Chapter two observes the development history and generating mechanism about the comparative"You/Meiyou"sentences through the perspectives of diachrony. According to the large-scale corpus search and theoretical analysis, we gradually found out the formative trail of comparative sentence pattern"Meiyou/You + NP + Pro + W", expounding that this circum construction is formed under the effects of various factors such as the prejudiced comparison construction, Medieval disyllabic evolution, analogy of the circum comparison construction, etc.Chapter three analyzes the syntactic and semantic feature of the"You/Meiyou"expressing comparison, and comes to the conclusion that they should be counted as the defective verb because there are some differences between the"You/Meiyou"expressing comparison and the attributive verb"You/Meiyou".Chapter four analyzes the syntactic structure of the comparative"You/Meiyou" sentences, and studies"W"in the comparative sentence pattern"X+ Meiyou/You + Y +Name(那么)+W"through the perspectives of semantic and pragmatic aspect. It points out semantic conditioning of comparative attribute"W". The functional types of comparative attribute"W"are classified and analyzed on the base of word material statistics. It is noteworthy that two or more comparative forms can be used together to highlight the comparative attribute.The final chapter reaches the conclusion, and simply discusses the further studies on related structures and topics.