Initiation-Continuation and the Unified Subjective-Objective Word Order of Chinese
Chinese word order follows certain regularities;however,there are numerous exceptions,making the word order system complex.It mainly exhibits the following characteristics:1)it requires various operations such as preposition and postposition movement;2)the treatment of verb-object structures is inconsistent compared to subject-predicate,attributive-modifier,adverbial-modifier,and verb-complement structures;3)the treatment of different types of objects within verb-object structures is inconsistent;4)the inversion of two components typically involves postposed subject,preposed adver-bial,preposed complement,and rarely preposed predicate,preposed verb.The features of Chinese word order are a manifestation of the uniqueness of Chinese.Chinese is a"noun-verb inclusion"language,where the noun is a super-noun category that includes the verb,and the verb is a subcategory of the noun,i.e.,the dynamic noun.In Chinese,nouns and verbs refer to referents and statements respectively,not grammatical categories but pragmatic categories.The structural relationship in Chinese is essentially a pragmatic structural relationship,which is"initiation-continuation".Initiation is the starting point of information transmission,and the subsequent part is continuation.This is consistent with what Yuen Ren Chao said that the subject of Chinese is the topic,and the predicate is the explanation.Chinese has many flowing sentences,which have characters of juxtaposition,referentiality and linkage.That determines initiation and continuation are reference equated terms.Chinese sentences are therefore of the equational type.Initiation and continuation can be exchanged without changing the basic meaning of the sentence.This is the underlying reason for the flexibility of Chinese word order and the existence of numbers of"inversed sentences".The structural relationship in Chinese is initiation-continuation,not only in the subject-predicate structure,but also in predicate-object,modifier-head and adverbial-head structures.This paper,originating from the unique property of Chinese sentences being initiation-continuation structures,constructs a concise depiction of Chinese word order:subjects invariably precede predicates,eliminating the need for subject-predicate inversion;attributives and adverbials invariably precede the head,eliminating the need for postposition movement;objects invariably follow verbs,eliminating the need for preposing object.Furthermore,it argues that Chinese word order stems from a juxtaposition relation and is fundamentally a unified subjective-objective word order based on perception—what is perceived first is articulated first.
Chinese word orderinitiation-continuationparatactic structureperception
万方数据
