Grammatical Mechanism Of Verb Reduplication In Mandarin Chinese

Reduplication is a grammatical means commonly used in human languages,which allows a new grammatical structure to form by copying all or part of a basic linguistic form.Chinese verb reduplication has received a lot of attention from scholars around the world since the 1940 s because of its unique semantics and usage,which has yielded abundant interesting and provoking findings in literature.However,most of the previous studies have focused on the forms of verb reduplication,grammatical meaning and syntactic restrictions and functions of verb reduplication.On the contrary,the nature of verb reduplication such as what type of grammatical means it belongs to and the grammatical mechanism of it have not yet been explicitly discussed.This thesis takes verb reduplication AA and ABAB as the research objects.Drawing on the Center for Chinese Linguistics(CCL)corpus developed by Peking University and combining with the lexical interpretation from the Modern Chinese Dictionary,this thesis explores the nature of verb reduplication and its intrinsic generation mechanism based on evaluative morphology theory(N.Crandi & L.K(?)rtvélyessy,2015)and distributed morphology theory(Halle & Marantz,1993).This thesis tries to answer the following two questions:(1)Why is the reduplicated part of verb reduplication an evaluative morphology?(2)What is the generation path of verb reduplication seen from the perspective of Distributed Morphology?First of all,this thesis adopts a research path from grammatical meaning to grammatical form,starting from the grammatical meaning of verb reduplication to the analyzing the grammatical form of verb reduplication.The main grammatical meaning of verb reduplication is to express the subjectivity of the speaker,which can be revealed in three ways: the speaker’s perspective,the speaker’s affect,and the speaker’s epistemic modality.By raising empirical evidence that verb reduplication is a syntactic operation,this thesis argues that verb reduplication is a morphological operation in which morphological changes occur within the word to form the corresponding grammatical form to express grammatical meaning.Since the grammatical meaning of verb reduplication is the subjectivity of the speaker,this thesis classifies the reduplicated part of verb reduplication,that is the second A in AA and second AB in ABAB as an evaluative morphology.Evaluative morphology is the third morphology distinguished from inflectional and derivational morphology,and it is expressed as a deviation from a standard or default value in one’s perception of the basic categories of knowledge of the world including things,actions,properties and situations and so on.The speaker’s deviation from the default value can go into positive and negative directions,which are revealed by “augmentative,ameliorative,diminutive,pejorative”,reflecting the speakers’ attitude of the speaker toward the object of speech.Secondly,we analyze the generation mechanism of verb reduplication by placing it in the framework of Distributed Morphology theory(Halle & Marantz,1993).It is argued in this thesis that verb reduplication is constituted by merging of a lexical root or base with no part of speech and the category-defining morphemes v to form the verb base form with verbal properties.Subsequently,this base verb merges with the evaluative morphology which delivers the speakers’ evaluative meaning,as a result of which verb reduplication arises.In this process,the category-defining morpheme v delimits the phase domain,and the subsequent syntactic operations are constrained by the PIC(phase impenetrability condition)principle so that they do not enter the phase domain.However,evaluative morphology is not in the inner phase domain v,so based on a verb reduplication,syntactic operations can be inserted to generate further variants of it(such as A “le” A,A “yi” A,A “le” “yi” A,A “a” A)Based on evaluative morphology and distributive morphology,this study provides a indept account of the nature of verb reduplication and its internal grammatical mechanism,cultivating new directions and new perspectives for future studies on verb reduplication.We also help to provide rich practical implications for teaching Chinese as a foreign language and cross-cultural communication.