A Constructional View of the Wangmian Sentence and Its Discourse Functions
摘要
Early studies in traditional Chinese grammar tendedDiscourse function to focus on function words and constructionsConstruction. Function words and constructions were thought to be so closely interrelated that one could only know how function words behaved once sentence patterns and constructions were taken into account. Wang Li (王力; 1943), in his grammatical work A Modern Grammar of ChineseA Modern Grammar of Chinese (《中国现代语法》), proposed six types of constructions: the optative, causativeCausative, disposalDisposal, passivePassive, pivotalPivotal, and compressedCompressed constructions.