Grounding And Sentence-completion

The research on sentence-completion in modern Chinese begins at the end of 1980s. A lot of explorations have been done in this field by many linguists such as Wang Ailu (1990), He Yang (1994), Huang Nansong (1994), Kong Lingda (1995), Jing Cheng (1996), Tang & Lee (2000), Hu Jianhua & Shi Dingxu (2005), and so on. They have done many researches in this field from different perspectives, such as aspect, boundedness, reference, tones and intonation, tense anchoring, and so on. However, former researchers mainly concentrated on the description and classification of the sentence-completing categories. In-depth studies are required on the questions why these sentence-completing elements can be applied to the completion of sentences and what the common features of sentence-completing elements are. Still, there is not a unified account for the conditions on the completeness of sentences from the nature of language. Besides, less attention has been paid to the nominals in sentence-completion research.In this thesis, we will discuss the conditions on the completeness of sentences in mandarin Chinese from the perspective of grounding in Cognitive Grammar and try to give a unified account for it. According to Langacker, each speech event involves a ground, which consists of place and time of speaking, the participants in the speech event and so on: grounding is the process whereby linguistic expressions are linked to the ground. Whereas simple noun or verb stem merely specifies a type, a full nominal or finite clause designated a grounded instance of that type. Grounding predications are obligatory grammatical elements needed to turn nouns into full nominals, and verbs into finite clauses. In the same way that nouns are grounded by determiners, finite clauses are grounded by tense and by modals which link the process designated by the clause to the specific usage event.Requirements on sentence-completion are varied in different sentences: some sentences can be accomplished by a single sentence-completing element, while some sentences need two or more sentence-completing elements to function corporately. Requirements on realis and irrealis, stative sentences and dynamic sentences are also varied.In this thesis, we agree that requirements on sentence-completion are the same both in English and Chinese. All sentences should have a reference point, and the function of grounding is to set up this reference point. Grounded, the location of the event described in the sentence is established relative to the ground in terms of reality. Then, the sentence is realized as a process and can stand alone as a communicative speech event.