A Study On The Text Function Of Time Words In Modern Chinese

This master’s thesis furtherly explores the syntactic functions of the modern Chinese time words on the basis of previous research. The modern Chinese time system consists of "time" and "tense". The time words and time phrases are two important ways of expressing "time" while the system of "tense" includes past tense, completed tense, processing tense and future tense. The modern Chinese time words can be classified as time-point words and time-period words, and also can be divided as ontology time words and substitution time words or sequential time words and its opposite words. The modern Chinese time words have three combination ways--fore-additional, back-additional and two time words used together.Except for their rich syntactic functions, the modern Chinese time words play important roles in organizing texts because of their high frequency of appearance there. To a certain extent, they have become an important way of constructing texts. Through analyzing and summarizing lots of related corpus, this thesis discovers time words’ rich text functions including government boundary function, reference function and cohesion function. In the aspect of government boundary function, there are three types of government boundary dimension--forward, backward and in both directions. According to different taxonomy standards, government boundary can be classified as ingredient, sentence and text government boundary, and also can be divided as direct government boundary and indirect government boundary. This thesis also sums up several ways of judging the government boundary, such as judging from the change of talking topics, objects, scenes and so on. In the aspect of reference function, the author analyzes its different reference meanings in different contexts, and explores its features of being situational and scalable. In the aspect of cohesion function, time words can connect different narrative themes, contents, objects, methods and constructs in order to make the text more natural and reasonable.