Less Than The Areas Of Comparative Sentences Inspection

Comparison, one of widely used categories in language, has been universally studied by linguists. Based on what has been achieved by other linguists on comparative categories, this thesis mainly discusses the sub-category--inferiority, by taking comparative sentences "buru" and sentences "meiyou" as the focal points, analyzing their differences and similarities on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels through the perspectives of synchrony and diachrony. The main conclusions of this article are the following:Firstly, the syntactic structure of comparative sentences is very flexible, though semantically it must have three components: comparative item (including comparative subject and comparative object), comparative result and comparative marker.Secondly, though sometimes comparative point is explicit, sometimes implicit, there are still some rules to follow. It can be implicit under a certain condition, eg, sentence itself or context, and it is also related to human's cognition.Thirdly, the comparative result is under the control of semantic requirement. Only those semantic components that can manifest the degree of difference may function as comparative results. Besides, there are more semantic restrictions on words and sentences in comparative sentences "Buji" than typical comparative sentences "bi" construction, which is the result of negation sentences with markers.Fourthly, although sentence "buru" and sentence "meiyou" indicating inferiority belong to comparative category, these two comparative sentences have respective characteristics of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. They have respective values and cannot be mutually substituted, which embodies the variety of expression patterns in Chinese. Meanwhile, the negative comparative sentence "bum" and sentence "meiyou" may present extreme meaning under some condition, this phenomena explains the expression of different sub-categories transcends each other, so comparative category is non-discrete, the demarcation of which is not explicit.Fifthly, the historical study of these two type sentences shows that the pattern of sentence "buru" has been commonly used since the pre-Qin period, but sentence "meiyou" has a comparatively short history. It comes into being after the Ming Dynasty and later gradually develops, "buru" and "meiyou" have the stable verbal characteristic, and they haven't been prepositionalized. This demonstrates the grammaticalization processes of sentence "bum" and sentence "meiyou" are slow and long. Sentence "buru" has strong subjectivity, while sentence "meiyou" has strong objectivity. It can be concluded from their different origin.The first three conclusions belong to the common characteristics of general comparative sentences, and also the predecessor have pointed out, the latter two items are new conclusions of the this paper.