The Naming Sharing Structure and its Cognitive Meaning in Chinese and English
This research puts forward two concepts, the Naming Sharing Structure (NSS) and the Naming Telling clause (NT clause) By transforming linear text into a plane structure, we discovered five construction patterns of NT clause for the NSS. The constructions of NT clauses are order preserving, nontransgressive, and syntactically well formed. These features of NT clause can be explained from the point of view of cognition. 1 NT Clause and Naming Sharing Structure Indo European languages are verb centered in syntactical and semantic analysis, and are analyzed into SVO or verb argument structure (e.g. Pollard Sag 1994, Dalrymple 2001, and Carnie 2013) This approach is not as suitable to Chinese since many Chinese clauses are subjector verb less. Moreover, basically many Chinese verbs can also function as nouns (Shen, 2013) On the other hand, Chinese is a topical language, so it is more convenient to analyze Chinese clauses from the perspective of a topic comment structure. Topic refers here to the similar concept as used in Systemic Functional Grammar (SFL; Halliday, 1994) but "subject" the traditional term, is also used together with a few adverbial and predicative components, so the concept of topic used here is more general. We refer to this type of topic as a 'naming' In combination, a naming (i.e. a reference) and a 'telling' which predicates or explains the naming, comprise an NT clause. When more than one telling shares the same naming, these NT clauses actually form a naming centered syntactical structure, which referred to as Naming Sharing Structure (NSS) The NSS is distinctively different from verb centered structure. This study is aimed at discovering the structural patterns of NSS and discusses its cognitive meaning and applicability. The two dimensional schema of NSS is illustrated in Section 2, and the shape of the schema can intuitively show the formal properties of NSS. In Section 3 and 4, examples of NSS in Chinese and English texts are illustrated respectively, and their patterns of constructing NT clauses are presented. The cognitive meaning of NSS is discussed in Section 5 and a conclusion offered in section 6. 2 The Newline Indent Schema and the Naming Sharing Structure Example 1 (Qian Zhongshu Fortress Besieged) Gao Song Nian Fa Fen Ban Gong ,Su Ye Fei Xie ,Jing Ming De Zhen Shi Shui Jue Huan Zheng Zhao Yan Jing ,Dai Zhao Yan Jing ,Zuo Meng Du Bu Han Hu De Yao Lan Ye Tiao Xuan De Hen Hao ,Zai Ping Cheng Xian Xiang Xia Yi Ge Ben Di Cai Zhu Jia De Hua Yuan Li ,Mian Xi Bei Shan Translation: Kao Sung nien worked furiously day and night without rest. He was so keen he literally slept with his eyes wide open and his glasses on, so that he was never lazy even in his dreams. The cradle had been very well chosen. It was the garden of a local millionaire, in the countryside of the P'ing ch'eng district; it faced a stream with mountains in the
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