The Dui-speech Sentence-completing Mechanism of Verbal Minor Sentences in Contemporary Chinese:The Perspective of Access and Activation Model
As one of the two major types of minor sentences,verbal minor sentences(VMSs)refer to verbal expressions occurring alone in discourse with relative self-contained meaning and accordingly achieving speakers'communicative goals.Compared with nominal expressions,VMSs are widely used and characterized by their greater flexibility and complexity,whereby syntactic peculiarity is revealed.However,previous studies on VMSs,mainly scattered in that on minor sentences as a whole or just focusing on regularities of the so-called zero-subject from the Indo-European grammatical point of view,has far from being adequate in either description or explanation.As such,the present study is to address the following two questions:1)how are VMSs characterized by sentence completion?2)why can a verbal expression be a relatively complete clause?The present study asserts that VMSs are characterized grammatically as"no minor sentences beyond dui-speech format",and dui-speech format is found to function as the essential sentence-completing condition for VMSs,fulfilling the sentence-completing function by way of achieving maximal conceptual efficiency and information sufficiency.These properties are conspicuously shown in the following two aspects:1)independent VMSs are found to be completed by implicit dui-speech format,while dependent VMSs are used in three forms of explicit dui-speech format,namely dialogues,flowing dui-speech clauses,and figurative dui-speech.The major semantic relation between the two-component clauses in dui-speech format is in an initiation-continuation pattern,entailing such patterns as question-answer,opening-responding,and topic-comment;2)complexity of dui-speech VMSs is closely related to the implicitness(or explicitness)of dui-speech format.Specifically,simple VMSs(including one-word VMSs)are mainly used in external dui-speech format,whereas complicated VMSs tend to be used in internal dui-speech format,the former with lower degree of independency and the latter with higher degree.Under the framework of access-and-activation model,the dui-speech sentence-completion phenomenon of VMSs could be explained.This study further proves that the sentence-completing representation of VMSs as"no minor sentences beyond dui-speech format"is conceptually processed as"no windows beyond dui-speech format",which reveals significantly the dui-concept-based dynamic processing of Chinese sentences.This process occurs primarily from conceptual overlapping,on the basis of which the dui-speech pattern functions to trigger co-activation and then spreading activation,establishes conce-ptual connections,and thus maintains conceptual coordination between the two-component minor clauses.This paper,as a detailed study of dui-speech grammar,gives a cognitive explanation for the dui-speech use of VMSs,providing another perspective on other dui-speech structures and even on the formation mechanism of Chinese sentences.
verbal minor sentencesentence completion by dui-speechaccess and activation
万方数据
