The Research Of Dummy Verbs In Modern Chinese

There is a special subgroup of verbs in modern Chinese called Dummy Verbs. It is a closed subgroup, and different from other verbs. In this paper, we take the dummy verbs as our studying objects, and do our research based on the previous works in the hope of making some new discoveries. The whole paper is divided into six chapters.Chapter One is the preface of the whole paper. It makes a brief introduce to our research, and points out the purpose and significance of the paper.Chapter Two discusses the definition and extent of dummy verbs. We redefine it on the basis of previous research and define our research extent. According to their semantic characteristics, we classify the dummy verbs into two categories.Chapter Three deals with the syntax characteristics of dummy verbs, including the similarities and differences among them. We describe the syntax characteristics on three aspects of transformation, the components before them and the components after them to show all of verbs are in a ranking sequence. Then, we give an explanation with the category theory for the typical and atypical members.Chapter Four analyzes from the development of dummy verbs in diachronical perspective. It illustrates that the forms of dummy verbs have changed from monosyllable to disyllable, and their meanings have evolved from content words to dummy verbs. We give an explanation to the development of dummy verbs combining with the grammaticalized mechanism of verbs.Chapter Five discusses the dummy verbs among world languages. We put the similar verbs in English, Japanese and Chinese together, making comparisons to show their similarities and differences. This part is a base for our future study in terms of typology.Chapter Six is the conclusion, summaries our viewpoint and explains the value, innovation of the paper. We hope our research could be good for Chinese studies, teaching Chinese as a second language and computer's natural language conduct research.