A summary of the study of Chinese word order

As we all know, because Chinese is a non-morphological language, the word order of Chinese is more important than some Indo-European languages. A series of questions about word order have been debated and studied in the discussion of subject-object language as early as 1950s. Since 1980s, more and more attention has been paid to the study of word order.

1. The essence of Chinese word order. Word order is called word order in some books. As early as 1930s, Zhang Shilu put forward the viewpoint of "establishing classes by word order and establishing systems by classes". With the deepening of research, the understanding of word order is becoming more and more profound. Shen Xiaolong believes that the arrangement and change of the order of sentence components are always observed by a relatively stable fulcrum in the sentence, which is generally the main verb of the sentence. As the semantic core of sentence structure, verbs are associated with the subject and object of the sentence at the first level. They are indispensable items in establishing the logical structure of sentences, which can be called arguments, while adverbials and attributives are non-argument components of sentence structure. Therefore, the study of Chinese word order should be investigated from two levels: argument and non-argument. At the same time, he believes that the concept of word order should be expanded from the characteristics of Chinese sentence organization. Chinese is a content-oriented language. The concept of word order in Chinese grammar should be extended to the arrangement of phrases, and the study of word order can be studied from a broad perspective. Shen's point of view has some reasonable elements, which is in line with a series of points of view of cultural linguistics that he has been advocating.

Zhao believes that it is difficult to explain the word order transfer of Chinese sentences by structural analysis alone, and high-level analysis is needed to understand why the word order has changed like this. For example, when the object of a Chinese sentence indicates unknown information, it usually appears at the end of the sentence, and when the object of a Chinese sentence indicates known information, it usually appears at the beginning of the sentence (Word Order and Emphasis of Chinese Simple Sentences, Language Teaching and Research, No.3, 1985). Zhao's analysis actually focuses on pragmatics. Although the analysis is not deep enough, the questions raised are still very enlightening. Lena and Thomson in the United States have similar views. They think that in Chinese, things expressed by SVO word order are neutral, while things expressed by SOV word order are contrary to expectations. For example, "he has finished his homework" is a neutral and general statement. "He has finished his homework" has a specific purpose, perhaps because the father is explaining to the mother why the child is watching TV instead of doing his homework (Taiwan Province Literature and Language Studies Series 1982 (3), translated by Huang Xuanfan, translated as Chinese Grammar). It is undoubtedly very insightful for Li Na and Thomson to put sentences in a certain language environment when analyzing the reasons for the change of Chinese word order.

In his master's thesis, Lu proposed that the formal factor of word order should be abstracted and deeply analyzed. In "Some Factors Restricting Chinese Word Order" (Journal of Yantai University,No. 1988,No. 1) co-authored with Mr. Hu Yushu, I put forward my own views on the nature of word order. This paper holds that word order should be a sequence of functional categories, or a sequence of "functional blocks" Usually, when analyzing the word order in a language structure, the basic unit of direct processing is at most about seven, so it is more appropriate to use "block" as the basic unit of word order analysis.

Among all the studies on the nature of word order, the most pioneering and instructive one is Wen Lian and Hu Fu's Several Problems in the Study of Chinese Word Order (China Chinese 1984 No.3). The two gentlemen believe that the arrangement of language units is restricted by many conditions, the most easily noticed is the limitation of meaning, while psychologists are concerned about the limitation of length. From the perspective of grammar, there are also many problems worthy of attention. They mainly raised three questions: 1. The position of nouns is related to the nature of verbs. For example, we have three word orders to choose from, but we only have two word orders to choose from. Therefore, it is promising to study verbs one by one, classify them and find out the rules of word order. 2. The arrangement of word order is related to the use of function words. In this respect, some grammar works in the past have noticed it, but now it seems that the relationship between the order of notional words and the use of function words is not as important as Ma Shi Wen Tong. It seems that there are still many things worth inheriting in the past grammar works. 3. Word order includes grammar, semantics and pragmatics. These three are both related and different. For example, in Modern Chinese edited by Hu Yushu (revised edition, 1987 edition), it is explained that the different meanings of "you see me" and "I see you" are due to the substitution of different words in the format of "a see b", and the syntactic relationship has not changed. The word order change here is semantic. "Is your brother there?" And "Is your brother here?" There are different colors, the latter is because the speaker is nervous, and the behavior itself first emerges in his consciousness, so he says it first. This word order is pragmatic, which is produced in the process of communication to meet the needs of a specific environment. There are only "visitors" and "visitors" and things like that. The difference between "rain" and "rain" belongs to syntax. The viewpoints and theories of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles and Khufu on the study of word order undoubtedly have important guiding significance for the in-depth study of Chinese word order. Sentences are based on syntactic structure, but sentences are not equal to syntactic structure, and sentences are often added and changed on the basis of syntactic structure. Some of these changes are related to semantics and some are related to pragmatics. If word order is limited to the scope of syntactic structure, many phenomena can't be explained clearly. In a word, word order is not a means of self-sufficiency, and it must be comprehensively investigated in many aspects to reach a practical conclusion.

2. Objects and attributes. In the research and discussion of Chinese word order, two issues have aroused widespread concern. First of all, how to treat the "object" in front of the verb. According to the traditional view, since the external verb takes the object as its generalized form, its object should be caught wherever it goes and still be regarded as the object. For example, a sentence like "the money has been spent" should still be a subject-predicate-object sentence, but it is already at the beginning of the sentence. Since then, this view has not had many supporters.

In Grammar Lectures (Commercial Press, 1984 edition), Zhu believes that the subject is not necessarily the agent and the object is not necessarily the patient, so the distinction between subject and object cannot be understood as the opposition between the agent and the patient. "Cleaning the glass" is the subject-predicate structure. Just because the "glass" is a patient, it cannot be said that the object is advanced, and "the guest is coming" is a predicate-object structure. Just because the "guest" is an agent, it cannot be said that the subject has moved back. Subject and predicate are syntactic concepts, while agent, patient and thing are semantic concepts. Although these two aspects are related, they are not the same thing and cannot be confused. He thinks that only the sentence "He went abroad, I heard" can be regarded as a prepositional object. Lu Jianming pointed out (Translocation in Spoken Chinese Syntax, China Language No.2, 1980) that the inversion sentence of prepositional object is not based on structural relationship, but is influenced by traditional meaning analysis and giving-receiving relationship. In fact, the same grammatical structure can represent different semantic relations, and different grammatical structure relations can also represent the same semantic relations. Generally speaking, Zhu and Lu's views are correct. But a sentence like "I can't name any student in our class" is considered by Lu Jianming to be a subject-predicate set with four layers (the unique overlapping phenomenon of Chinese syntactic components, China Language No.2, 1990). There are still different views on this. Lv Shuxiang once pointed out in Grammatical Analysis of Chinese that "I don't remember this matter in my mind now", "this matter", "I", "I am in my mind now" and "a little impression" are all subjects one by one. Will it blur some useful differences?

Modern Chinese, edited by Hu Yushu, holds that the patient object can precede the verb under certain conditions, and not all the nominal components before the verb are subjects. Its condition is: 1. The object is an interrogative pronoun, which is often collocated with adverbs "Du" and "Ye". 2. The object is preceded by a "one" and followed by an adverb "no" or "no, no"; 3. Some objects are not interrogative words, but the whole sentence is in the form of enumeration, and the objects in clauses can also be used before verbs. The above three have a common feature, that is, they have multiple meanings and emphasize the object. In this regard, Mr. Wen Lian and Mr. Hu Fu believe that in this case, the use of the object before the verb only changes the position of the object, but does not change the structural relationship between the verb and the object. Li Ziyun (subject-predicate sentence, Language Teaching and Research No.3, 1982) also expressed his views on this issue. In his view, subject and predicate are two main parts in the first level of sentence structure. The object is the structural component inside the predicate. Therefore, the change of the object position can only be limited within the scope of the predicate, not beyond the scope of the predicate. Therefore, they all think that for the need of expression, some patients behind predicate verbs can be moved to the front of verbs. Although the position has changed, the structural relationship between them can still remain unchanged.

Shen Xiaolong, on the other hand, thinks that some main brain components of Chinese sentences can be regarded as moving from a position in the predicate to the beginning of the sentence as a topic (A Study of Theme Sentences in Zuo Zhuan, China Chinese, No.2, 1986). But "displacement" is just a convenient way to explain semantic relations. Because once it is shifted, it is no longer a sentence component in the original sense, but fundamentally changes the type of sentence. Sentences are no longer narrative, but critical. In his view, the "displacement" of the object essentially reflects the different angles taken by Chinese language thinking to reflect reality. It is the fundamental factor that determines sentence patterns, and "shift" will inevitably lead to the transformation of sentence patterns.

Secondly, how to treat the postposition and preposition of attributes. Linguists of the older generation, such as Wang Li, li jinxi, Chen Wangdao and Shi Cunzhi, all think that Chinese attributives can be postpositioned. Only Zhang Zhigong thinks that the modifier comes first and the modifier comes last, so it can't be reversed. Once reversed, it becomes another relationship. Modern Chinese, edited by Zhang Jing, holds that the normal position of attribute is before the head language, and sometimes it can be moved after the head language or before the verb predicate for the need of expression. The postposition or preposition of an attribute is still an attribute. Mr. Zhang's so-called attribute has been moved to the verb predicate, which means "the wall is covered with red, green and yellow slogans." Pan Xiaodong also holds the same view in On the Shift of Attributive (China Chinese 198 14) and Consistency of Grammatical Structure and Semantic Structure from Attributive Shift (Zhejiang Linguistics Yearbook 1984). He thinks that "red", "green" and "yellow" are attributes, because they are part of speech and it is impossible to modify the verbs behind them. Moreover, when these elements return to the object noun as attributes, the meaning of the whole sentence remains unchanged, but it is more clear. In his view, the reason why the attribute moves forward is because the verb requires the object to be as close as possible. When there are several properties in front of the object, those properties loosely combined with the header language may be pushed to the front. Moreover, when the speaker deliberately emphasizes an attribute, he will also move it to the front of the verb.

Lu Jianming pointed out in On Attributive Shifts (China Language No.3, 1982) that although the components of structures such as "red", "green" and "yellow" are part of speech, these structures are not part of speech, which is different from nominal combinations. They are often used as adverbials. Lu also pointed out that the attribute "Qianjin" has a modified relationship with the noun object from the semantic relationship, but from the grammatical structure, they are not the attribute components of the object. In fact, as early as 1980, Lu Jianming had summarized the translocation between Chinese attributive and head language, and pointed out four conditions that a translocation sentence should have: 1. The sentence stress of the translocation sentence must be in the front part, and the back part must be read lightly; 2. The meaning focus of translocation sentence is always on preposition, and the latter part can never be emphasized; 3. Both inverted components in the translocation sentence can be reset, and the meaning of the sentence remains unchanged after the reset; 4. The modal particles at the end of the sentence never appear after the later part, but must follow the previous part. Lu's above induction is basically consistent with the actual language, which has important reference value for determining transposition sentences in pragmatic communication. Shao Jingmin's The Shift of Attributive from the Three Dimensions of Word Order (Journal of East China Normal University, No.4, 1987) holds that strictly distinguishing the word order changes of grammar, semantics and pragmatics is the premise to determine the shift of attributive. However, depending on the function of the grammatical components of the moving position, the recognition method of "excluding grammatical functions" is adopted to determine whether it is an attribute after the shift. It is proved that only a few typical nominal structures with "exclusive predicates" are still attributes after postpositioning, while the so-called prepositional attributes do not exist, some are adverbials and some are subjects.

3. Multi-angle exploration. In addition to the research mentioned above, word order has a wide range. First of all, the problem of Chinese language types related to word order has aroused the interest of scholars at home and abroad. In their book Mandarin Chinese, Li Na and Thomson believe that Chinese is a language with both SVO and Soviet characteristics according to Gruenler's viewpoint and their own analysis. Mandarin is gradually changing from SVO to soff. Some scholars have put forward different views on this. In Several Problems in the Study of Chinese Word Order, the Federation of Literary and Art Circles and Khufu pointed out that some scholars obviously absolutized Greenberg's theory, which went against his original intention in methods. It also makes a comparison between ancient and modern times from three aspects: the position of modifiers, the use of post-words, and the problem of modal particles at the end of sentences, thus irrefutably denying the arguments of Dai, Li Na and Thomson about Chinese typology.

Secondly, some scholars have conducted in-depth discussions on some specific problems in Chinese word order from a micro perspective. Representative examples are Zhang Bojiang's Word Order of Several Parts of Speech Objects (China Chinese 199 1 No.3), Liao's Word Order of Adjoining Nouns in Modern Chinese (China Chinese 1992 No.3) and Mei Fang's Word Order of Objects and Verbal Words. Zhang Wen analyzed four verb-driven word orders with objects, and investigated the differences of expression of these different word orders from the perspectives of historical development, pragmatics and communication. This paper also discusses the emergence and causes of "le", introduces the relationship between old and new information and word order, and explains the mandatory and tendentious laws of various word order formats in use. On the basis of summarizing previous studies, Liao Wen put forward eleven principles that affect the arrangement order of Chinese coordinate components, namely, importance principle, chronological principle, familiarity principle, prominence principle, positive attitude principle, foothold principle, one-way principle, similarity principle, correspondence principle, politeness principle and from simplicity to complexity principle. Liao Wen believes that the principle of classification is multifaceted, including psychological-cognitive, social-cultural and pragmatic-context. In order to fully explain all these principles, we must look at them from different angles. Liao Wen's research undoubtedly deepened people's understanding of the restrictive factors of word order arrangement. The factors that restrict morphemes in Wen Fang mainly start with the reference of "n", and introduce two pairs of concepts related to reference, namely, referred and non-referred, certain and uncertain. In addition, it also studies new information and old information, past and future, and the length of noun components. Finally, a diachronic dynamic comparative analysis is made. The author thinks that "verb, momentum, noun" and "verb, noun, momentum" have different ideographic functions, and the frequency of use of the former tends to increase, and its application scope is getting wider and wider.

Thirdly, combining logic and phonetics to study word order. Hu Yushu and Lu put forward that "word order should be a sequence of functional categories" for the first time in the article "Some Factors Restricting Chinese Word Order", and thought that speaking Chinese word order mainly focused on syntactic word order phenomenon. This paper holds that "fully weighted terms, special weighted terms and existential terms" in logic also have an influence on the word order of Chinese, and the word order of quantitative terms sometimes plays a decisive and leading role in whether a sentence is qualified or not. More often, under certain conditions, the order of quantitative items and the order of deep cases determine whether a sentence is qualified or not. This paper also thinks that rhythm also has some influence on Chinese word order. For example, disyllabic verbs generally cannot take monosyllabic postposition objects, such as "cleaning the street" and "writing a script" are all unqualified. 2. 1 Rhythm is rarely used in verb-object structure, but it is often used in biased structure, such as "long-haired rabbit" and "workbench". Another example is that "copying documents" and "taxi" are ambiguous, while "copying" and "taxi" are exclusive. In short, the problem of rhythm is also a generalized word order phenomenon, which mainly reflects the restriction and choice of syntactic word order on rhythm. Of course, on the other hand, the rhythm form also has certain restrictions and choices on word order.

To sum up, the study of Chinese word order is being carried out at multiple levels and angles, and a series of achievements have been made. However, because the word order phenomenon involves many problems, many problems have not really been revealed, and further efforts are needed in the future.