An Analysis Of The Nature Of Chinese Double-subject Constructions From The Perspective Of Reference-point Relationship

This thesis concerns a special linguistic phenomenon in the Chinese language:the Double-subject Construction featured by two juxtaposed noun phrases(NP1 and NP2)placed at the beginning of a sentence,where an inner clause led by NP2 works as the predicate of the whole construction,for example,他头疼(He has a headache,or literally "He head aches").However,on the basis of this definition,the statuses of the initial two noun phrases NP1 and NP2 are so confusing that cause a lot of problems to the study of Chinese Double-subject Constructions.Traditionally,different scholars held different views on the statuses of the two initial noun phirases.The Chomskyan linguists treated both of them as subjects,but they did not point out the differences between the two subjects.The functional linguists labeled NP1 a topic and NP2 a subject,but the "topic" label only serves a kind of pragmatic function,as it is not a grammatical category.The American structuralists regarded both of them as topics,which is also questionable,because their views deny the existence of subjects.Besides,seldorm did the previous scholars explain the cognitive mechanism behind this linguistic phenomenon.In view of the above problems,the author defines Chinese Double-subject Constructions as this:a full-clause expression with two juxtaposed noun phrases NP1 and NP2 placed at the beginning of a sentence,in which NP1 is the possessor with respect to NP2 and each of the two noun phrases claims the status of subject-hood;formally,it can be demonstrated as[NP1[NP2 Predicate]]with NP2 and the predicate form an inner clause to describe some characters of NP1.Based on this definition,the author classifies Chinese Double-subject Constructions into three kinds:Ownership,Kinship and Body-part Double-subject Constructions.This definition makes the research object clear.Considering the previous debates on the study of Chinese Double-subject Constructions,this thesis mainly concentrates on three questions:1)What is the status of NP1?2)YWhat is the status of NP2?3)What is the cognitive mechanism of the Chinese Double-subject Construction?Answering these three questions solves the previous debates about the statuses of the two juxtaposed noun phrases NP1 and NP2,and explains the way Chinese Double-subject Constructions work.Langacker(1993)said that reference-point relationship,always signified by mere juxtaposition,is the common denominator of Possessive Constructions and can be profiled at the clause level,even when there is no any morphological marker.In Chinese Double-subject Constructions,the initially juxtaposed two noun phrases NP1 and NP2 are also in possessive relationship without any syntactic marker.Thus,this thesis analyses Chinese Double-subject Constructions from the perspective of reference-point relationship in cognitive grammar.In a profiled reference point relationship,NP1 serves as the salient reference point to establish mental contact with a target,the inner clause[NP2 Predicate],which is one of the potential targets in the dominion activated by the reference point NPi.Besides,topic,subject,possessor and reference-point are closely related to each other in cognitive grammar;thus,through careful study,the conclusions of this thesis are:1)NPi is a topic-like subject with respect to the full clause,that is to say,NPi is a clause-level subject and serves the topic-like function at the same time;2)NP2 is both a predicate-level subject and clause-level subject with respect to the predicate and inner clause respectively;and 3)the cognitive mechanism behind the Chinese Double-subject Construction is a type of reference-point relationship.