School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses

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End date: 1999 × Start date: 1980 × Type: PhD thesis × Subject: Chinese language × Subject: transitivity ×

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    Material and relational transitivity in Mandarin Chinese
    Zhou, Xiaokang ( 1997)
    This thesis presents a Systemic-Functional analysis of aspects of transitivity in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on two major types of clause: material clauses and relational clauses. Material clauses represent actions/events in the material world. Relational clauses express relationships between entities in the most general sense; they include as their prototypical members 'being' or ‘copula' clauses. Chapter 1 provides a brief account of the theoretical framework of SFG. The following four chapters constitute the bulk of the thesis. Chapter 2 provides a detailed description of material clauses. Chapters 3 - 5, deal in turn with three major types of relational clause: attributive, locational and possessive. One of the significant findings of the thesis is that relational clauses encompass a much larger portion of the grammar than is usually believed, and include various 'processes' such as 'giving', 'renting', 'putting', in addition to 'being' (usually classified as material). Hence the notion of transitivity has been refined. The analysis of material and relational transitivity in Mandarin Chinese in this thesis is organised in the form of networks of semantic choices, which characterise clause types and sub-types in terms of role configurations, together with realisation rules which map the semantic representations onto linguistic constructions. An important characteristic of this approach is that syntax and lexicon are integrated into a unified whole - the lexico-grammar. Another is that the model can be used in sentence generation in computational linguistics. Chapter 6 presents conclusion, which highlights the recurrent issues and topics for further investigation.