An Syntactic And Semantics Study On Time Case In Modern Chinese

Time Case, the object of this study, refers to the relationship between temporal nominals and predicates. We mainly analyze the syntactic and semantic features of Time Case in modern Chinese.For a start, based on previous studies, we classify Time Case according to form or semantic standard:three categories which accord to form standard are marked, unmarked, and registration marked; two categories which accord to semantic standard are time-point and time-interval. We also consider the transformation between temporal words and structures. Temporal structures are the complicated structures of temporal words, and can form new temporal structures by recurring, compounding and nesting.Moreover, a detailed study on the syntactic functions of Time Case is made. We make both qualitative and quantitative analysis on the distribution of syntactic functions of Time Case. And we discuss the basic characters of Time Case as adverbial or complement. The next, we compare the Time Case as adverbial or complement, and analyze the ability of quantity structures to be adverbial or complement. Once again, we differ the ability of Time Case and Space Case to be adverbial and complement, and use the "container-content" image scheme in cognitive linguistics.