世新大學圖書館

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-11, Section: A, page: 3490.

Sponsor: CLIFFORD A. HILL.

Thesis (ED.D.)--COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY TEACHERS COLLEGE, 1994.

Chinese, as a non-inflectional language, depends heavily on word order to establish the meaning of a sentence. Generally speaking, the positions of sentence elements in an unmarked structure are not flexible for movement. However, certain sentence constructions do have an alternative sequence. These sequence variations have not received adequate attention in the study of Chinese syntax, either with respect to semantic distinctions or pragmatic functions.

As these variable sequences feature postpositioning a sentence element to the clause-final position, this research has proposed that the clause-final position in Chinese is marked for information focus. Specific hypotheses were formulated: (1) when the final position is occupied by a verb phrase (VP), the verb status is in focus; (2) when a noun phrase (NP) is in the final position after a VP, the NP is in focus; (3) when a positional verb is in the final position after a zai locative phrase, the verbal status is in focus, whereas when a locative phrase follows the positional verb, the location is in focus; and (4) some constructions (e.g. the ba-construction) may have a two-level focus with the final VP as the primary focus.

To test the end-focus hypothesis, a written experiment with elicitation tasks was conducted to survey Chinese native speakers' use and understanding of variable sentence constructions. Three pairs of constructions based on a common variation were selected: (1) the ba-construction versus its non-ba counterpart; (2) inversion versus the you-existential with verbal extension constructions; and (3) the pre-verbal versus post-verbal zai locative constructions with positional verbs.

The experimental results were analysed using both frequency and cross-tabulation methods. Overall, the experiment achieved a positive result: the majority of the subjects chose target constructions whose final elements reflected the anticipated communicative focus.

This study concludes that all variable constructions do not convey exactly the same message. The clause-final position in Chinese performs important functions, such as enabling sentence focus to reflect new information, saliency, providing emphasizing contrasting items, or introducing a new topic into the discourse. In effect, it constitutes a strategic position for discoursal focus and linkage. Therefore, pragmatic factors are an important word-order determinant.

School code: 0055.