On The Definiteness Of Postverbal Bare NPs In Modern Chinese

The study of the reference of noun phrases in modern Chinese has been a key issue inlinguistic researches. Because the reference of noun phrases has been divided into severaldifferent systems. And when the linguists and scholars do research on this aspect, they alwayschoose the different systems as their rationales. As a result, the conclusions are alwaysdifferent as well. The bare noun phrase is a sub-category of noun phrase. Many scholars doresearch on its reference, especially, on the definiteness of bare NPs. Bare NPs can be used inevery aspect of daily life. And how to interpret the reference of bare NPs has a great effect onour social order. So it is important to interpret the reference of bare NPs correctly. Why dolisteners and speakers have the different reference interpretations towards the same bare NP?We should not only make clear why bare NPs can be definite and indefinite, but also find outthe factors which influence the definiteness of bare NPs. And what’s more, we mustunderstand how these factors work in determining the reference of bare NPs. Theinvestigation is divided into the following parts:First of all, because of the different classifications of the reference, the author redefinesthe concepts of reference and definiteness, which will occur in this paper, hoping to get morestandard and scientific conclusions. Besides, the author makes a summary on the literaturefrom every possible aspect. The former researches chose only one aspect of language, such assyntax or context, to do the study and they gave their incomplete conclusions. This kind ofresearch always takes a part for the whole. For example, it can not explain why somepostverbal bare NPs can still be definite. And this phenomenon contradicts Shi Yuzhi’sSyntactic Structure Assignment Principle(句法结构赋义规律). Considering the connectionbetween language and human’s cognition, the author tries to analyse these “exceptional” definite postverbal bare NPs from the cognitive aspect.Secondly, the author use Frame Semantics to do research on the definitenessinterpretation of these “exceptional” bare NPs. Language is a system of arbitrary vocalsymbols used for human communication(Liu Runqing, Wen Xu2006:8). It is mostly used indaily communication. Cognition is the basis of human knowledge. Language creation,acquisition and application all rely on cognition. Besides, there is a “prototype” in human’smind. People can understand every word or phrase with the help of this “prototype”. Just dueto this prototype, we can find the foundations of these “exceptional” phenomena.In this paper, the writer combines description with explanation, theories with practice toillustrate the working procedures of Frame Semantics which is used to explain thedefiniteness of postverbal bare NPs. After this analysis, there are the following findings in thelast chapter: first, there exist some postverbal bare NPs which are definite; second, thedefiniteness interpretation of these postverbal bare NPs can not be explained by the traditionalmethods, such as Syntactic Structure Assignment Principle; third, if the postverbal bare NP isdefinite in a sentence, there must be a trigger in this sentence, and the postverbal bare NPshould be in the semantic frame which is evoked by this trigger. Only meet these threeconditions can the definiteness interpretation of postverbal bare NPs gets the reasonableexplanation.