A Study On The Format Of "Small A Little B" In Modern Chinese

The research object of this paper is "xiao A xiao B" pattern in modern Chinese. This paper tries to study this whole pattern including its internal composition, syntactic and semantic features, pragmatic functions and the comparison with the related pattern——"da A da B".This paper makes a detailed analysis of "xiao A xiao B" pattern which is under our research scope in CCL Corpus. The paper analyzes the odd and fixed part "xiao" in the pattern according to the part of speech and the meaning. The paper also analyzes the even and embedded part in the pattern from syllable, morphology and the part of speech.In terms of syntactic function, this pattern can act as different syntactic ingredients as well as clauses; In terms of semantic function, the paper analyzes the semantic relationship between "A" and "B", and then makes an explanation of reversible and irreversible cases on the basis of statistics. In addition, based on semantic relationship among antecedent, consequent and the whole pattern, the paper summarizes the structural meaning in the aspect of parts of speech and the degree of solidity.The paper also explains why does this pattern emerge according to the economic principle and analogy mechanism of language. The paper also analyzes pragmatic values of this pattern from the aspects including rhythm, stylistic features, emotional coloring, focus salience and subjectivity.Finally, the paper analyzes and explains the symmetric and asymmetric phenomenons between "xiao A xiao B" and "da A da B" by the foundation of symmetric and asymmetric theory as well as the predecessors’ study of "da A da B".