Research On Markedness Patterns Of Locative Preposition Structure And Relative Problems

Preposition structure is a common type of syntactic structure in modern Chinese. While the locative preposition structure is one of the most typical, which refers to the place of the action or state in the sentence, and as an important manifestation of human cognitive sequence on the spatio-temporal relationships in the language. Thus the issue of its word order has been a hot research in academic circles. Although the study in word order of locative preposition structure and its related issues have made abundant achievements, That research progress and the reference or use of emerging theories and methods provides sustainable development space of this area of research. This dissertation is based on the markedness theory, exploring the asymmetric phenomenon between the locative preposition structure and the factors which affect its position in the sentence, analyzing these markedness patterns and their functions in the asymmetry, and also pay attention to these factors itself that affect word order.At first, we take the principle of temporal sequence as the most important factors influencing the word order of location preposition structure, focus on the position relationship of the preposition structure and the verb in movement event. We suggest the location preposition structure has an opposing semantic group which refers to the start and the end points of objects’ movement caused by actions, where there are asymmetric phenomena. Then we investigate the forms of the marked and the cause of asymmetry. In addition, there is still a opposing semantic group which refers to that the goals have achieved or not in the item of end points of objects’ movement.Secondly, proceeding from the syntax and semantic feature of verbs, we discuss some factors such as sentence-completing information, rhythm factor, semantic categories which impact on relationships between verb and preposition structure. There also are some asymmetric phenomena between two sides. The markedness patterns exsit in verb and preposition combination structure not only refers to markness reversals, but also relative markness.In the end, We suggest that whether the object is definite or not has a tendentious impact on selecting the relevant sentence patterns of location preposition structure. It will involve the study of the deep structure of these sentence patterns in generative grammar.