Study On Example Connectives In Modern Chinese Texts

This paper takes example connectives in modern Chinese texts as study object. It analyzes and investigates their structure and nature, the way how they appear in the texts, the capacity of combination, the structural characteristics of their former and latter items, their stylistic features, textual functions and pragmatic functions.This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter one introduces the reason of writing, the object of study, the thoughts and methods of study, the meaning of study, the summary of previous studies and the sources of language data of the article. Chapter two discusses the structure and nature, the way how they appear in the texts of the example connectives. It makes a statistical analysis of how such connectives appear in the texts as well. We find that, the example connectives can be divided into three categories based on the structure and nature:one is word, one is compound word by grammaticalization, and another is frame structure which has strong solidification. In the way of appearing, they can appear in a sentence, or be used independently or in the bracket. Different example connectives have their own characteristics in different appearing forms. Chapter three discusses the capacity of combination of the example connectives. It can be modified by adverbs, frequently combines with modal particle "ba", and it can be used in combination with one another. Chapter four discusses the structural characteristics of their former and latter items, that is, their former items all can be clauses, simple sentences, complex sentences or sentence groups while the latter items have different structures according to the different example connectives. Some can connect words, phrases, sentences and sentence groups, some can merely connect words and phrases. Chapter five discusses the textual functions, the pragmatic functions and stylistic distribution of example connectives. Their main textual functions are cohesion and coherence while the pragmatic function is that it served as the discourse markers for giving examples. The example connectives have different appearance proportion in different language styles. We also make a statistical analysis.