A STUDY ON STRUCTURE, FUNCTION AND DIACHRONIC EVOLUTION OF CHINESE EXTENDED MIDDLE CONSTRUCTION

摘要

Chinese extended middle construction, as in “zhe liang che kai qilai henkuai” (This car drives fast) is found primarily in spoken Chinese. Theintriguing semantic relations and syntactic features have prompted manyscholars debating its particularity and intrinsic properties. This studyexplores the structure, function, and historical developments of thisconstruction in order to discover the interaction between form andmeaning in this construction.The dissertation consists of eight chapters. In chapter one I give aliterature review on the current research of this construction, and brieflyoutline the organization of my dissertation. The central claim of chaptertwo is that, although there exists disagreement among scholars whobelieve that the English middle construction and Chinese qilaiconstructionare not the same thing, the status of Chinese extended middleconstruction is established through comparative studies and crosslinguisticdata with other languages especially with English. In chapterthree I shift to the descriptive and illustrative context where Chineseextended middle construction emerges and put forwards that thisconstruction is a double-topic nested structure. The issue of how its formand meaning/function suited in a pair is emphasized in this chapter. Thisleads to me to tackle the stratification and extension of this construction inchapter four, where I argue that the three levels ---- micro-construction,meso-construction, and macro-construction could be specified in thisgeneralized construction. The distinctions among those levels could bedrawn in this systemic perspective. Chapter five further investigates thesyntactic distributions of micro-construction as well as their functions andmeanings, based on which I put forward the synchronic grammaticalizationanalysis model. It is believed that the diachronic development is thehistorical expression of synchronic part, therefore, in chapter six andseven I continue to discover how this construction comes out, why itappears when it did, and what kinds of factors motivate and make it comeinto being. Taking use of the framework of radical construction in viidiachronic studies, this dissertation not only describes the evolvementprocess of middle constructions but also investigates how this constructionwas emerging. Chapter eight is the conclusion of the dissertation.This dissertation attempts to unite the synchronic and diachronic analysismodels. Besides, it integrates the static descriptive distributions on oneside and dynamic structuralization or grammaticalization on the other side.It focuses not only the existed form and meaning, but also theconstructioning process of the form-meaning pair, that is, how thisform-meaning pair comes out, which paves the way to take the new andincreative strategies of construction grammar.