CHAPTER ONEGENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research background
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in language subjectivity with linguistsemphasizing that language not only objectively expresses propositional thoughts, butalso expresses the subjective elements, such as the speaker’s views, emotions andattitudes. Language facts show that no matter what context verb reduplication appears in,it can show a kind of subjective will of the speaker, that is, subjectivity.
As one of the important grammatical features of modern Chinese, verbreduplication has received considerable attention. In the 1950s, scholars like Yu (1954)introduced this phenomenon, and summarized the grammatical meaning of verbreduplication. In the 1960s, great progress have been made in the research of this areamade , and a series of articles dedicated to the reduplication of verbs have beenpublished since the end of the 1970s. Up to now, experts have had discussions on thescope, forms, meanings, and pragmatic functions of verb reduplication. It is generallyaccepted that many additional meanings are added to the verb after it is reduplicated. Amuch debated question is: what additional meanings have been added, and what is therelationship between the additional meanings and the subjectivity of the speaker.Furthermore, reduplicated verbs can also create relaxed and casual atmosphere with aeuphemistic tone. In addition, not all verbs have their corresponding reduplicated formsdue to certain restrictions. But there is little published research on the connectionsbetween these restrictions and the subjective expression of the speaker. It is of greatimportance to uncover the inner relationship between Chinese verb reduplication and thespeaker’s subjective expression. This study is an attempt to do so.
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1.2 Significance of the study
Previous studies found that verb reduplication has various features. Comprehensivelyspeaking, it can be roughly summarized into six aspects. Wang (1963) and Zhu (1996)observe that verb reduplication in modern Chinese generally contains repetitive behavior.Zhu (1982) argues that verb reduplication means short time. Zhao (1968), Lǚ (1980) andLi (1996) regard verb reduplication as the state of trying. Zhu (1982) points out thatreduplicated verbs can express euphemism, and Chang (1996) mentions thatreduplicated verbs can express wishes and requests. Zhao (1993) states that the use ofreduplicated expressions in declarative sentences can make the tone in a relaxed andleisurely way. Liu (1996) and Chang (1996) demonstrate that reduplicated verbs have adescriptive effect which is mostly used to describe the dynamic actions of a certain partof the body.
To date, great achievements have been made in the study of verb reduplication interms of breadth and depth, but the views on some of the issues have not yet reachedconsensus. This thesis will further explore the specific usage and core meaning of verbreduplication, and try to put it into the concrete language environment for analysis.Specifically, the subjectivity theory adopted in this thesis could be a novel perspective tounderstand and explore the subjective factors of Chinese verb reduplication, which willgenerate fresh insights to the theoretical study of Chinese verb reduplication.Additionally, learning Chinese is widely welcomed in foreign countries, but most of thelearners think that understanding and using Chinese appropriately is a tough task due tothe dramatic differences between languages. As an important linguistic feature ofChinese, verb reduplication serves a significant part in Chinese teaching. Therefore, thisstudy can provide some implications for a better understanding of Chinese verbreduplication and make a major contribution to teaching Chinese as a foreign language.
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CHAPTER TWOLITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Chinese verb reduplication
This section mainly introduces the basic concepts of Chinese verb reduplication,discusses the views of different scholars on Chinese verb reduplication, summarizesthe different types of verb reduplication and finally provides a simple evaluation.
2.1.1 Reduplication and Chinese verb reduplication
Reduplication refers to the fact that a certain form of language reappears. It is awidely used grammatical method and a common phenomenon in human language.The universality is manifested in two aspects: on the one hand, reduplication appearsin almost all languages; on the other hand, reduplication can occur at any level of thelanguage system, namely, speech sound, vocabulary, sentence, segment or discourse.Various language units can be reduplicated.
The concept of reduplication has always been one of the research focuses, butopinions vary from person to person. Regarding the nature of reduplication, there aretwo representative views. One is that the reduplicated component should be asupplementary element which is completely or partly the same as the attachedcomponent rather than a specific word. Another is that reduplication is amorphological change of words. According to Zhao (1968), duplicating the samemorphemes is not necessarily a reduplicated type which refers to all that are regularly related to grammatical functions.
Zhu (1982) divides reduplication into morpheme reduplication, syllablereduplication and word reduplication. The basic form of reduplicated nouns such as“爷爷(grandfather), 奶奶(grandma), 爸爸(father), 妈妈(mother), 叔叔/舅舅(uncle),哥哥/弟弟(brother), 姐姐/妹妹(sister)” is the bound morpheme. There are only a fewreduplicated nouns other than kinship terms including “娃娃(baby), 猩猩(gorilla), 包包 (bag)”. In addition, some basic forms like “ 蝈 , 蛐 , 饽 , 猩 ” in words “ 蝈 蝈(grasshopper), 蛐 蛐 (cricket), 饽 饽 (cake), 猩 猩 (gorilla)” never appear on otheroccasions, and they do not make sense itself. It can be seen that “蝈蝈(grasshopper),蛐蛐(cricket), 饽饽(cake), 猩猩(gorilla)” belong to syllable reduplication rather thanmorpheme reduplication.
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2.2 Studies of verb reduplication
In this section, the related research on verb reduplication will be summarized. Theresult shows that these studies can be roughly divided into four parts: the range, themeanings, the grammatical functions, and the pragmatic functions.
2.2.1 Range of verb reduplication
Regarding the question of what type of verbs can be reduplicated, differentconclusions will be drawn from different perspectives. The research on the range ofreduplicated verbs in modern Chinese has been very thorough and systematic. Ingeneral, whether a verb can reduplicate is often closely related to the characteristics ofthe action, its internal structure, its meaning, the style of language, tenses andsentence patterns.
One well-known study which is often cited in research on verb reduplication isconducted by Liu (1983) who summarizes the range of reduplicated verbs based onthe characteristics of actions. According to his analysis, only action verbs and someverbs that express activities of thinking can be reduplicated. What’s more, they mustmeet the two conditions: the action can be repeated continuously and the action can becontrolled by the agent. When expressing a future action, the range of reduplicatedverbs will be larger with some verbs related to social activities, politics, educationbeing added. Liu’s study, however, only mentions the general range of verbreduplication rather than specific conditions. Li (1996) analyzes verb reduplicationfrom another angle, and divides non-reduplicated verbs into six categories: (1)non-action verbs, including auxiliary verbs, mental activity verbs, descriptive verbs,and verbs indicating judgment, existence, change, disappearance, tendency; (2) uncontrollable verbs, such as “ 病 ”(get sick), “ 愁 ”(become sad), “ 疯 ”(get mad),“昏”(get faint), “死”(die), “失去”(lose), “遭遇”(encounter), “抱歉”(be sorry), “发烧”(get fever), etc; (3) causing verbs, such as “使”(make), “令”(order), “准”(permit),“任命”(appoint), “判处”(condemn), “同意”(agree), etc; (4) transient verbs, such as“爆炸”(explode), “成立”(establish), “出发”(depart), “到达”(reach), “抛弃”(abandon),“失去”(lose), “停止”(stop), etc; (5) verbs of negative form, such as “不顾”(disregard),“ 不 离 ”(be unfavorable), “ 不 容 ”(intolerant), “ 不 许 ”(forbid), etc.; (6) verbs withnegative meaning, such as “患”(suffer), “垮”(collapse), “盗窃”(steal), “陷害”(frame),“自杀”(suicide), “逃跑”(escape)”, etc.
语言学论文参考
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CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY AND THEORETICAL BASIS.....................243.1 Methodology........................... 24
3.2 Data Collection.....................................25
CHAPTER FOUR FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS...................... 39
4.1 Introduction........................ 39
4.2 The speaker’s perspective...........................39
CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSIONS...................... 54
5.1 Introduction........................... 54
5.2 Major Findings........................ 54
CHAPTER FOURFINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS
4.1 Introduction
In the second chapter, the concept of verb reduplication is introduced and the viewsand opinions of different scholars are summarized, leading us to get the followingobservations. In a broad sense, all the reduplicated usage of verbs can be called verbreduplication and other elements can be inserted into the reduplicated verbs; in anarrow sense, only adjacent reduplicated verbs belong to verb reduplication withoutant elements being inserted between the reduplicated verbs, including three differenttypes: AA, ABAB, AABB. Meanwhile, it is found that the research on the range, themeanings, the grammatical and pragmatic functions of verb reduplication areabundant, which is of great significance to our study on the subjectivity of verbreduplication. To be more specific, the thesis will analyse the subjectivity implied inverb reduplication from three aspects, namely the speaker’s perspective, the speaker’saffect and the speaker’s epistemic modality.
The perspective refers to the speaker’s observing angle of objective events and statesor the starting point for narration. The speaker’s perspective is often embodied insentences in an obscure way which can typically reflect the speaker’s subjectivejudgment on the momentum of the action. Zhu (1956) points out that the attributes ofstate adjectives are related to the quantity or the speaker’s subjective estimation. Thesame goes for verb reduplication since the uncertainty of quantity is often connectedwith people’s subjective consciousness.
语言学论文怎么写
CHAPTER FIVECONCLUSIONS
5.1 Introduction
So far, we have conducted a detailed study on the subjectivity of Chinese verbreduplication. In Chapter 1, the research purpose and research questions areintroduced. Chapter 2 reviews the relevant literature, including the meanings, forms,grammatical and pragmatical functions of verb reduplication. Chapter 3 mainly showsthe methodology adopted in this thesis, with CCL as the main sources of languagedata and subjectivity theory as the theoretical basis. Chapter 4 plays a significant rolein this thesis because language data is analyzed and discussed in this section. Theresearch questions put forward in this thesis have basically been solved. In thischapter, I will summarize the thesis from four aspects, including major findings,implications, limitations and suggestions for further research.
The characteristics of verb reduplication are abundant, and scholars have conductedin-depth research from different aspects such as the range, the grammatical meanings,the grammatical functions and the pragmatic functions. Through the summary of therelated literature, we can learn the specific forms and types of verb reduplication. Verbreduplication, as the main grammatical means in modern Chinese, can also showsubjectivity, which refers to the self-imprint left by the speaker during the interaction.Putting verb reduplication in a specific language environment and analyzing it fromthe perspective of the speaker’s perspective, epistemic modality and affect, we cananswer the question of how verb reduplication expresses the speaker’s subjectivity.
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