汉语广义中动式的结构、功能和历时演变
蔡淑美
Chinese extended middle construction, as in “zhe liang che kai qilai hen
kuai” (This car drives fast) is found primarily in spoken Chinese. The
intriguing semantic relations and syntactic features have prompted many
scholars debating its particularity and intrinsic properties. This study
explores the structure, function, and historical developments of this
construction in order to discover the interaction between form and
meaning in this construction.
The dissertation consists of eight chapters. In chapter one I give a
literature review on the current research of this construction, and briefly
outline the organization of my dissertation. The central claim of chapter
two is that, although there exists disagreement among scholars who
believe that the English middle construction and Chinese qilaiconstruction
are not the same thing, the status of Chinese extended middle
construction is established through comparative studies and crosslinguistic
data with other languages especially with English. In chapter
three I shift to the descriptive and illustrative context where Chinese
extended middle construction emerges and put forwards that this
construction is a double-topic nested structure. The issue of how its form
and meaning/function suited in a pair is emphasized in this chapter. This
leads to me to tackle the stratification and extension of this construction in
chapter four, where I argue that the three levels ---- micro-construction,
meso-construction, and macro-construction could be specified in this
generalized construction. The distinctions among those levels could be
drawn in this systemic perspective. Chapter five further investigates the
syntactic distributions of micro-construction as well as their functions and
meanings, based on which I put forward the synchronic grammaticalization
analysis model. It is believed that the diachronic development is the
historical expression of synchronic part, therefore, in chapter six and
seven I continue to discover how this construction comes out, why it
appears when it did, and what kinds of factors motivate and make it come
into being. Taking use of the framework of radical construction in
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diachronic studies, this dissertation not only describes the evolvement
process of middle constructions but also investigates how this construction
was emerging. Chapter eight is the conclusion of the dissertation.
This dissertation attempts to unite the synchronic and diachronic analysis
models. Besides, it integrates the static descriptive distributions on one
side and dynamic structuralization or grammaticalization on the other side.
It focuses not only the existed form and meaning, but also the
constructioning process of the form-meaning pair, that is, how this
form-meaning pair comes out, which paves the way to take the new and
increative strategies of construction grammar.
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