"a Dream Of Red Mansions" Coupling Study

In the theory of musical Chinese sentences and the view of functional sentence form the Chinese language is a language based on logic sequence and it has no vivid form symbols or restrictions. The Chinese language can "link phrases directly to form a sentence", that is, with the base point of phrases and the cohesion of logic sentences are formed to fulfill the relevant expressing functions by having phrases chained up directly. Chinese sentences are functional sentences, and the sentence boundary is restricted to the fulfillment of expression, which makes the language in a state of flowing phrase-chunks piled up.Guided by this theory we discover coupling phenomena abound in the Dream of Red Mansion. By analyzing the 23 kinds of coupling sentences we find that coupling sentence is a special phenomenon of Chinese, which has the dialectic thought of Han people for original support, meaning expressing function for cohesion, and the two phrase-chunks are coupled to ensure the rhythm fluency and the meanings responding to each other.Coupling sentence is not an absolute sentence form and different from a sentence of two or more clauses defined in traditional grammar, which not only materializes the musical characteristic of Chinese but also embodied the difference of sentence structure and essence between the two languages of Chinese and English. At the same time the analysis of meaning type of coupling sentence has made it clear that the dialectic thought of Han people deeply influences Chinese sentence formation and "coupling" is an important principle to define sentence boundary, therefore, the view of functional sentence form in Chinese Cultural Linguistics is verified: Chinese sentences can not be analyzed like the western inflectional languages through form and structure but through the expressing function of sentences and the logic within the sentence.