A Semantic,syntactic And Functional Comparative Study Of Demonstratives And Demonstrative Phrases In Chinese And Russian

Demonstrative is an important semantic and pragmatic category that is universally present among world languages.Different languages use different forms and means to express this category,and demonstratives（and demonstrative phrases）is one of the most typical and common ways of expressing that category.Although the researchers conducting typological studies of demonstratives has achieved substantial results,most of these studies are from the macro perspective,and focus on whether there are demonstratives in different languages,on the classification of these demonstratives,on the functions of demonstratives and mechanisms of extending these functions and so on.The in-depth cross-language comparative studies of the micro usages of demonstratives are rare.Therefore,this paper focuses on Chinese and Russian and conducts a detailed syntactic,semantic,pragmatic comparative study on demonstratives and demonstrative phrases in these two languages and makes an attempt at explaining the similarities and differences between Chinese and Russian demonstratives from the perspective of functional,cognitive and typological language characteristics.First of all,this paper conducts a systematic comparison of the usage of demonstratives in Chinese and Russian,and finds that when a Chinese demonstrative is a subject or an object of the sentence,its usage is restricted by many factors,such as semantic characteristics of a referent,types of predicates divided from event semantics perspective and so on,while Russian demonstratives are less affected by these factors.In Russian,the semantic properties of demonstratives have a big influence on the ability of demonstratives to become a subject or object of the sentence,distal demonstratives almost never have a subject or object syntactic function.Distal demonstratives in Chinese don’t have that restriction.Secondly,by separately investigating the structural elements of different demonstrative phrases,this paper presents a detailed comparison of syntactic and semantic functions of demonstrative phrases in Chinese and Russian.It is found that there are great differences in the syntactic distribution,semantic referents and pragmatic functions of "Dem+Class+Noun","Dem+Class","Dem+Noun" and"Dem+One+Noun" in Chinese,while there are fewer types of Russian demonstrative phrases with different internal structure,and fewer differences in syntactic and semantic functions of these demonstrative phrases with different internal structures.Finally,this paper discusses the so-called "kind-identifiable reference" usage of Chinese demonstrative phrases.By investigating the previous studies on the topic,this paper puts forward the idea that the "kind-identifiable reference" usage belongs to"individual reference" rather than "generic reference",and summarizes the specific restrictions of the aforementioned usage of demonstrative phrases from verb collocation,noun selection and other aspects.In addition,this paper compares the corresponding usages of demonstrative phrases in Russian,and finds that the existence of "kindidentifiable reference" demonstrative phrases has a certain degree of cross-linguistic universality,but the usage of this type of demonstrative phrases in Russian is narrower and more restricted.