The Functional Syntactico-semantic Analysis Of Chinese Pivotal Sentences

As a special type of clause in modern Chinese,Chinese Pivotal sentences(CPS),can be formalized as “(NG1)+VG1+NG2+VG2”.Since NG1 is not an obligatory constituent,it can be omitted in some cases.In this structure,NG2,the pivotal constituent,serves simultaneously as the Object(Complement in SFG)of VG1 and the Subject of VG2.This construction has caught the attention of many grammarians since 1920 s,and lots of achievements have been made in the study of it.However,few scholars have made in-depth analyses of CPS from the perspective of the Sydney Grammar,and none of the studies have yet systematically matched the semantic functions to the syntactic elements in CPS.In this research,the author takes the “V+N+V” type of CPS as the research object.Basically,all the data in this thesis are collected from an online corpus at www.cncorpus.org.With the aid of data retrieval,1127 Chinese Pivotal sentences have been selected.By adopting the box diagram in the Sydney Grammar,the semantic analysis of the selected 1127 CPS has been made from the three metafunctions of the Sydney Grammar,which include the aspects of experiential meaning,interpersonal meaning and textual meaning.Then,the tree diagram in the Cardiff Grammar is also adopted to present their syntactic analysis.Through the detailed syntactico-semantic analysis of the selected 1127 CPS,it is revealed that CPS can realize material process,mental process,verbal process,relational process,and existential process,under the framework of SFG,hence they can be classified into the above five categories according to their transitivity analysis.Among those 1127 selected CPS,there are 779 material type of CPS,197 mental,120 verbal,18 relational,and 13 existential type of CPS.Moreover,some rules are recognized through the study: in most cases,the NG2 and VG2 in the mental CPS jointly constitute the Phenomenon,serving as the Complement of VG1;the existential CPS are usually considered as clause complexes including at least one existential clause;and in other three types of CPS,NG2 and VG2 are normally analyzed separately.In addition,we have taken notice of the causative CPS and consider them as a mixed type since their process is realized by the main verb instead of the causative verb.This research provides a new perspective to the study of CPS,which contributes to enhancing our understanding of CPS.Moreover,this research is also conducive to the teaching and learning of Chinese as a foreign language.