Chen zuohong

(School of International Language and Culture, Beijing Central University for Nationalities 10008 1)

Focusing on the restrictive effect of pragmatic factors on Chinese syntax, this paper discusses how teachers should use pragmatic knowledge more reasonably in teaching Chinese as a foreign language from five aspects: pragmatic factors and syntactic word order, interference of context, topics of concern, focus and old and new information, pragmatic word order and analysis of conversational implicature.

[Keywords:] Pragmatic factors; Syntactic structure; Word order; context

[China Library Classification Number] H 195 [Document Identification Number] A [Document Number]1001-7178 (2004) 01-0067-06.

[date of receipt] July, 2003-14

[Author Brief Introduction] Chen Zuohong (196 1-), female, Hebei Laiwen, associate professor of the School of International Language and Culture, Central University for Nationalities.

Pragmatics, Pragmatic Plane and Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

Pragmatics, translated from English, is a science that studies how to understand and use language in different language environments, and all dynamic factors related to language users are his research scope. Pragmatic plane refers to pragmatics in grammar, which studies the relationship between language symbols and their users and using environment. The former takes all pragmatic meanings produced in language use as the object of investigation and research, while the latter studies pragmatics related to syntax and pays attention to pragmatic meanings expressed in syntactic structures.

Teaching Chinese as a foreign language is a second language Chinese teaching with the ultimate goal of cultivating learners' communicative competence. The whole teaching process is the process of cultivating learners' communicative competence in Chinese appropriately. It can also be said that the communicative competence we want to cultivate is a kind of language use ability, which is reflected in the appropriateness of language use in specific situations. Therefore, it is obviously against the teaching purpose to explain the structure and meaning of a language in isolation from the communicative process and value of the language. Although there are obvious differences between pragmatics and pragmatics in the research scope and emphasis, they both attach importance to the process of language communication, the communicative value of language and the dynamic significance in the process of language use, so they are of guiding significance to teaching Chinese as a foreign language. This paper will focus on the restrictive effect of pragmatic factors on Chinese grammar and explore how teachers can use pragmatic knowledge more reasonably in Chinese teaching.

Second Pragmatic Factors and Syntactic Word Order

Mr. Zhao Jinming pointed out in the article 1994 "Some Principles of Grammar Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language" that "the generation of sentences is a serialization process from deep structure (semantics) to surface structure (syntax) for the purpose of communication, and this order depends on the correctness of semantics, the finiteness of syntax and the selectivity of pragmatics". The center of language expression is semantics, and syntax is the means to express semantics, so syntactic structure is actually semantic syntactic structure. However, once it enters concrete communication and becomes a discourse, it is bound to be restricted by the communicative context. How to convey meaning and information and what kind of syntactic means to choose are directly related to pragmatics. Mr. Lu Chuan summed up the relationship between them with "semantic premise, syntactic coercion and pragmatic selectivity" and defined "pragmatic selectivity" as follows: "Pragmatic selectivity refers to choosing a word order with the best communicative effect from several legal word orders on the basis of full consideration of semantic and syntactic constraints, according to the context and communicative intention." (2) Obviously, "legal word order" refers to the word order that conforms to syntactic restrictions. For example:

A 1 Dad beat Mingming badly. A2 Dad played very hard, Mingming. A3 was obviously beaten badly by his father.

According to the restrictive rules of syntax, this group of sentences can only be placed after the compound predicate-complement structure with no object at the end of the sentence, and pragmatic selectivity such as "hitting hard" should also ensure that it is the focus at the end of the sentence. A 1 and A3 all meet the requirements. In other words, in the context of communication needs, you can choose "Dad" or "Mingming" as the topic, as long as "playing badly" is the key point at the end of the sentence. A2 does not meet the requirements, so it is wrong. If the sentence has no syntactic restrictions, such as:

The police caught the thief. B2 The police caught the thief. Thief B3 was caught by the police.

Then the sentences are completely arranged by words. That is to say, according to the communicative intention and context, it is the right choice to choose the sentence with the best communicative effect from B 1, B2 and B3. Mr. Wensuolin calls the sentences whose static syntactic structure is directly reflected in dynamic use regular sentences. However, in the process of dynamic language use, due to the needs of the speaker's communicative purpose, the syntactic structure will be reorganized and adjusted in use, which will bring about changes in pragmatic meaning. Let's take A2 as an example. When a father and a mother should play Mingming, someone told me eagerly, "Dad plays Mingming very hard. (Mom doesn't play badly) ",that person becomes a legal word order. This sentence pattern, which not only reflects the syntactic structure but also adjusts the word order, is called variant sentence by Mr. Wen. ③ Variant sentences are all caused by pragmatic word order.

As we all know, word order plays an important role in the syntactic structure of Chinese because of the lack of morphological changes and the emphasis on parataxis. The word order of regular sentences is restricted by pragmatic factors, and variant sentences are sentences whose word order changes due to pragmatic factors. Undoubtedly, the word order of Chinese is restricted by pragmatic factors. In fact, pragmatic factors not only affect the choice and change of syntactic structure, but also cause the change of sentence expression purpose and mood. Therefore, pragmatic factors play an important role in the serialization of Chinese expressions for communication purposes.

Interference of three contexts

If we ask any China person casually, "Tuck in the quilt!" And "Cover the quilt!" What's the difference between these two sentences? Most people say so. But if the specific situation is explained clearly, they will naturally choose the former or the latter. The former is generally used to simply remind each other; The latter is only used when the speaker finds that the other person should cover the quilt and not cover it. Visible because there is no context, even China people can't tell the difference between these two sentences. Therefore, we should pay full attention to the interference of context on syntactic structure in teaching. Context can be divided into broad sense and narrow sense. Context in a broad sense includes not only situational context, that is, the specific environment in verbal communication, but also the social and cultural background of the speaker's use of discourse. Context in a narrow sense, also known as context, is the preface and postscript of discourse. Context not only affects sentence pattern transformation and restricts syntactic structure, but also has a direct relationship with word order, which can not be ignored in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Situational context can also play an extremely important role in teaching.

"Ba" sentence has always been a very headache in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Teachers spend a lot of time and energy on repeated teaching and practice, but few Chinese learners can consciously use the "ba" sentence. The author once introduced a dish to 12 students in an intermediate class. As a result, only two of them used the word "ba", one of them used it as many as nine times (Ishigaki Zhang Zhi used it on the right person, and the other only used it once (Kobayashi Ryunosuke used it correctly). In this situation that China people use the word "ba" very frequently, most students use inappropriate sentences in their articles, such as "washing vegetables", "cutting vegetables" and "cooking beef for half an hour", which is exactly what we need to reflect on.

Our teaching Chinese as a foreign language has always been restricted by grammar research, mostly confined to a single sentence pattern. In general materials, the emphasis on "ba" sentence is to show the domination and influence of the subject on the object. In 199 1, Mr. Zhang found that "such a theoretical understanding is difficult for foreign students who are learning Chinese as a foreign language to understand and accept." Because what is disposal, why is disposal, what is impact, and what is the reason for the impact, we have not answered. "Not only that, because of the influence of structuralism, when talking about the word" ba ",it is basically from the perspective of structural form, and most of the exercises are aimed at structural design. This kind of teaching can't achieve the purpose of using the word "ba" properly, because we can't say "cover the quilt!" "Cover the quilt! "What's the difference? Nor can it make learners understand under what circumstances the word "ba" should be used. Let's look at the mistakes made by a group of foreign students in using the "ba" sentence:

C 1 I ate jiaozi in Wudaokou canteen. C2: I bought fruit on my way home. C3: I left my luggage in the dormitory.

Errors like C 1 and C2 happen to students whose mother tongue is completely different at the same time, so we have to find out the reasons from our teaching. When we talk about the "ba" sentence in textbooks, we especially emphasize a structural feature, that is, there must be other components behind the verb. Many books have also listed such a formula: the subject is ten, the object is ten, and the verb is ten other components. The "other components" here include the result complement, while the "zai" in C 1 and C2 is just the result complement of the verb, which meets the requirements, but why not? Mr. Li Dazhong believes that the direct cause of these mistakes is that he doesn't understand the semantic features of this kind of "ba" sentence. Students must understand that C3 is correct, because "luggage" was not in the "dormitory" originally, but because of "release", "luggage" existed in the "dormitory". ⑤ However, this kind of mistake often occurs in sentence-making without context, and learners' attention is focused on the structure in order to make "ba" sentences. When foreigners learn Chinese, the most important thing is to express their thoughts in the Chinese they have learned. When learning Chinese grammar, they are most concerned about which grammatical form should be used to express a meaning. If we design some typical contexts to show the "ba" sentence in teaching, such as asking a student with a lot of things in his hand to say "put things on the table" when doing other things, then paying attention to purposeful practice in the context, and then analyzing the pragmatic function of the "ba" sentence in view of the problems in the practice, learners can pay full attention to the interference of the context while paying attention to the structure and semantics of the "ba" sentence, so as to make them understand. Because context restricts the use of language and the understanding and expression of discourse, it determines that learners' ability to recognize context will directly affect their pragmatic competence. Therefore, I think that ignoring pragmatic factors in teaching is also one of the reasons for this mistake.

Rational use of pragmatic factors and attention to the interference of context can not only make learners better understand the semantic implication of syntactic structures in teaching, but also promote learners to actively choose different sentence patterns in appropriate contexts.

Fourth, pay attention to topics and key points, and sort out old and new information.

Topic, also known as theme, has always been a neglected concept in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. It is the old information that both speakers know, and it is also the starting point of expression and the center of speech. The choice of topic directly affects the mode of sentence expression, such as:

Gaku Yamamoto learns Chinese very well. D2 Gaku Yamamoto speaks Chinese very well.

The word order of D 1 and D2 is different because the speaker chooses different topics. If only the objects of attention in teaching are different, learners will think that two sentences have the same meaning, and either sentence will do. If we guide learners to notice the difference of topics from the dynamic process of verbal communication and the actual paragraphs of sentences, which is the result of the speaker's choice according to the needs of communication, then the difference between D 1 and D2 is obvious. So that learners can avoid blindness and subjectivity when choosing to use it. It won't happen that we students still use D 1 to answer improperly when the questioner's attention is directed to "Chinese".

The key point is to express the center of gravity, which is the most important new information that the speaker wants to convey. Chinese follows the principle of information structure arrangement of sentences from known to unknown, and, like human language, has a sentence ending focus. Let's take group B sentences as an example: the differences between B 1, B2 and B3 are different topics; B 1 and B2 have the same topic, but the difference lies in the different emphasis at the end of the sentence. 1"The police caught the thief" The most important new information is "thief", which is intended to tell the other party who the police caught. In B2, "the police caught the thief" means that the most important new information that the speaker wants to tell the other party is the result of the police catching the thief. In B2, "police" and "thief" are both known information, and do not express the focus. In order to give the position at the end of the sentence to the focus, the non-focus components move forward with "Ba". It is necessary to consciously draw learners' attention to the difference between B 1 and B2 through context design, which is caused by different communication needs and different expression emphases. In addition to the focus at the end of the sentence, Chinese also has the focus of contrast. For example:

Gaku Yamamoto played very well. E2, Gaku Yamamoto, well done.

In the teaching process, when students use E2 to express themselves, teachers often tell them to add "hen", which is the habit of China people. This explanation will only make learners more confused. They either mistakenly think that Gaku Yamamoto didn't do a good job and should add a "hen" when expressing themselves, or think that these two sentences actually mean the same thing. If the teacher makes it clear that E2 is a sentence with a comparative focus and makes it appear in the communicative context of "Yamamoto and Kobayashi learn well", students can easily understand that E2 has a comparative focus, and the difference between E2 and E 1 becomes clear: E 1 is a sentence with no focus at the end; E2 is to tell each other "who learns well", with the emphasis on "Yamamoto". The presuppositions of the two sentences are different, and there are two or more contrast items in the presupposition of E2.

Five pragmatic word order

After a period of study, China learners will have some questions, because when they come into contact with real native speakers, they find that what China people say is often different from what they learn. The flexible change of Chinese word order is one of the problems. Our teaching only teaches the word order of syntax, but ignores the pragmatic meaning of sentences. Syntactic word order is the overall reflection of the basic syntactic structure rules of a language, which is stable and abstract. It presents the static appearance of word order in language. In practice, due to different contexts, the order of syntactic elements is often adjusted for the need of expression. From the perspective of functionalism, any abnormal phenomenon in language has its specific pragmatic value.

An China man answered the question "Did you listen to the weather forecast?" Use "sunny, tomorrow". It is the psychological effect of being eager to answer that makes the subject move backward, which is the result of pragmatic factors. No one will think that he is wrong because the contextual conditions are clear. However, when an international student answers the teacher's question "What will the weather be like tomorrow" with "Tomorrow will be fine" in class, it should be corrected to "Tomorrow will be fine". For another example, just in the spring, I saw a man wearing a sweatshirt and shorts. China people used "Isn't it cold?" You "Definitely better than our students." Are you cold? "It more accurately expresses what the speaker wants to express at this time. In the process of communication, it is also common to omit the subject that moves backward because of the intervention of context. In addition, in the notice of finding things, we ask students to pay attention to the fact that it is best to change "500 yuan RMB in the wallet" and "three Chinese books in the bag" into "500 yuan RMB in the wallet" and "three Chinese books in the bag". The syntactic word order of this kind of attribute transposition can't be explained clearly, because it makes the important numeral attribute in the Notice of Looking for Things become the focus at the end of the sentence by changing its position, which is the word order change brought about by pragmatic factors.

As the shift of components caused by pragmatic reasons often occurs in communication, pragmatic word order is bound to be a problem that we should pay attention to in teaching. A reasonable analysis of pragmatic word order will not only help students to make accurate pragmatic reasoning and more accurate understanding when they hear variant sentences in communication, but also help learners to better understand the relationship between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Make them pay more attention to the interference of context, thus making communication more comfortable and decent.

Conversational implicature analysis

Conversational meaning is the core of pragmatics, which studies the true meaning of discourse according to context. It is not what the speaker said, but what the speaker may express. The complexity of language communication determines that the prediction and understanding of conversational implicature is a key issue in language communication. If you misunderstand the meaning of the conversation, the conversation will not go smoothly. In other words, an accurate understanding of conversational implicature also restricts the form of expression, because understanding and expression complement each other in speech acts.

For second language learners, the learning of every syntactic structure or language point is the basis for accurate understanding and proper expression. Therefore, with the help of conversational implicature analysis in the teaching process, it will be of great benefit to improve the ability of proper communication. Many idioms in spoken Chinese have specific communicative meanings when used, some of which are prescriptive and some of which must be recognized and understood in context. For example, "Lian ... Ye/Du ..." is a grammatical item in the primary stage, which appears in the sentence pattern of "Don't say" ... Lian ... Ye ... "is in the middle stage. When the teacher pointed out that this was a sentence pattern of "Lian" ... Ye/Du ... ",many students said it could be used. After simple review and practice, the teacher asked the students to answer, "Can you finish 30 jiaozi?" . There are some sentences in the students' answers: "Don't say 40, I can even finish 30" and "Don't say 20, I can't even finish 30". It is not difficult to see from these two wrong answers that they want to directly answer whether they can eat 30 jiaozi. The sentence pattern of "Lian" ... Ye/Du ... "is just a way to affirm or deny a minimum reference point to show the hidden meaning that may not be seen literally. That is to say, using this sentence pattern is not a direct answer to the other party's question, but a way of quoting and comparing. These mistakes are all caused by students' failure to grasp this key problem when learning this sentence pattern. In addition, learners don't understand the positive and negative forms of "Lian" ... "Ye/Du …" sentence expresses the conversational meaning in the opposite direction, which is also one of the reasons for misuse. Therefore, the analysis of conversational implicature in teaching is of direct help to learners to understand the communicative meaning of this sentence, to choose reference items accurately when using this sentence, and to decide whether to use affirmative sentences or negative sentences.

In short, whether from the perspective of the listener or the speaker, an accurate understanding of the conversational implicature directly affects the smooth progress of communication. Proper application of conversational implicature analysis in teaching can get twice the result with half the effort.

Seven sections

The main drawback of static grammar teaching is that it is out of touch with communication. After learners master the syntactic structure skillfully, they just create some basic sentences taken out of context. Of course, mastering language knowledge is also a necessary condition to skillfully use language, but the task of language teaching "Language only exists in use after all" (Lv Shuxiang 1990) is to make learners skillfully use language for proper communication on the basis of understanding and mastering the different division of labor in usage and pragmatic functions of different grammatical forms. Therefore, we should attach importance to the pragmatic motivation explanation of syntax and make dynamic analysis of sentences in specific contexts, rather than making abstract explanations on the premise of adding pragmatic terms. However, if a teacher has countless minds, it will be difficult for learners to understand the differences and make the right choices when using them.

Mr. Fan Kaitai once put forward several basic contents of pragmatic analysis: "Discourse structure analysis-how the speaker chooses the starting point of conversation (topic) and how to form a discourse around the topic; Analysis of psychological structure in communication-how the speaker chooses the focus of discourse to highlight the center of interest in communication; Analysis of information structure in communication-how the speaker arranges the transmission mode from known information to new information; Modal analysis of tone-how the speaker chooses the appropriate tone and intonation to express his attitude and emotion to the content of the speech, as well as the attitude and emotion of the listener, including the analysis of the implication produced in specific situations. "

Pragmatic analysis, like syntactic analysis and semantic analysis, aims at cultivating learners' communicative competence in teaching, and all three are indispensable. The difference is that the context, topic and other factors involved in pragmatic analysis are all investigated from the dynamic communication process, so from the perspective of communication, pragmatics is the key.

Whether and how static syntactic and semantic structures should be changed in human communication is restricted by pragmatics. Therefore, on the basis of semantic analysis, the teaching of syntactic structure is raised to the communicative level, and the basic sentences of language are transformed into verbal communicative sentences in the process of use, so that learners can understand that different syntactic structures are different choices made by speakers according to different communicative intentions and purposes in different contexts.

[References]

Zhao Jinming. Principles of Grammar Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language [J] Language Teaching and Research, 1994(2)

[2] Lu Chuan's semantic premise, the mandatory pragmatic selectivity of syntax [J] China Learning, 2000, (3)

[3] Modern Chinese Pragmatic Plane Research [M] Beijing: Beijing Library Press, 200 1, 143

[4] Zhang's "Ba sentence structure" semantic and pragmatic analysis [J] Chinese teaching and research, 199 1, (3)

[5] Analysis of the errors made by foreigners learning Chinese grammar in Li Dazhong [M] Beijing: Beijing Language and Culture University Press, 1996, 146, 147.

[6] Brief introduction to Fan Kaitai's pragmatic analysis [a], Dai,. Three planes: multi-dimensional perspective of Chinese grammar research [c] Beijing: Chinese Publishing House, 1998

Rational application of pragmatics in teaching Chinese as a foreign language

Chen zuohong

(School of International Education, Central University for Nationalities, Beijing, 10008 1)

Based on the restrictive role of pragmatic factors in Chinese sentence structure, this paper discusses how teachers can use pragmatic knowledge more appropriately in teaching Chinese as a foreign language from five aspects: pragmatic factors, contextual interference, topics of concern, central issues and new and old information, pragmatic word order and dialogue analysis.

[Keywords:] Pragmatic elements; Sentence structure; Word order; context