On The Iconicity Of Verb Reduplication In Chinese

Verb reduplication is a typical morphology in Chinese,and extensive studies have been done on its structural patterns,grammatical functions and grammatical meanings.Different perspectives have been used to approach the iconicity of the verb reduplication,but there are still many disagreements.This thesis is an attempt to interpret the grammatical meanings of verb reduplication from the perspective of iconicity.The main focuses are the basic grammatical meanings of verb reduplication,their iconic interpretations and implications on the disagreements.The data in this thesis are collected from the following sources:(a)Dictionary of Modern Chinese(the 7th edition)and online Dictionary of Chinese,(b)online Mandarin Chinese corpora,i.e.,corpus of CCL(corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics Peking University)and corpus online,(c)Contemporary Chinese Grammatical Knowledge Base,a machine dictionary developed by Institute of Computational Linguistics of Peking University,and(d)some examples in literature.Interfering factors such as sentence patterns and modifiers of frequency are considered.The data are analyzed based on the iconicity theories,i.e.,motivations of conceptual distance and conceptual complexity,quantity principle and iconic model of reduplication.This study reveals the following findings: the basic grammatical meaning of verb reduplication is the repetition or continuation of the action.Other grammatical meanings of verb reduplication such as meanings of short time,habitual behavior,attempt and encouragement of an action are dependent on the nature and context of the verb.The verb reduplication is iconically motivated and reduplication of the linguistic form corresponds to that in the conceptual domain and morphological complexity is involved with the semantic complexity and pragmatic complexity.