句法从属与语篇设景机制——以汉语描写性关系从句为例

Subordination and Textual Grounding Mechanism:A Case Study on Chinese Descriptive Relative Clauses

本研究基于语篇设景理论探讨了关系从句在语篇中的地位。首先,区分语义层和表达层的前景-背景,明确制约表达层前景-背景的3个等级标准。其次,以汉语描写性关系从句为研究对象,考察其在短篇新闻语体中的语篇功能。研究发现,近一半的汉语描写性关系从句处于首段这一显著位置。背后的动因是从句在相关性原则的作用下实现前景化,并受到了语体因素的制约。

This research explores the status of syntactic subordinate clauses in texts based on the Grounding Theory proposed by Khalil.Firstly,the paper distinguishes the foreground-background structure at the semantic level from the surface level,and proposes the three criteria that determine the expression of grounding.Secondly,this analysis examines the Chinese descriptive relative clause in a self-built short-news-text corpus,and finds that nearly half of the Chinese descriptive relative clauses are placed at the initial paragraph,a highly prominent position.This phenomenon is explained in terms of the foregrounding of subordinate clauses,which is guided by the relevance theory and constrained by the textual genre.