The grammatical features of Chinese

Chinese presents a series of different characteristics of analytical language:

(1) Chinese lacks form. Word order and function words are the main means to express grammatical meaning.

The lack of morphology in Chinese means the lack of morphological changes to express grammatical meaning. Morphological change refers to the change in the form of grammatical category. Such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, such as sex, number, case, tense, person and so on. English personal pronouns and verbs have different forms when they are subjects and objects, such as "she loves me" and "I love her". They are the same pronoun "she" (or "I") and have different forms. They are the same verb "love". When the subject is in the third person, "s" should be added, but not in the first person. However, in Chinese, "she loves me" and "I love her", the two pronouns "she" and "I" do not change whether they are subjects or objects; The verb "love", whether the subject is the first person or the third person, has no corresponding morphological change.

Modern Chinese auxiliary words such as "men", "zhe" and "Le" are similar to the end of a word to a great extent, but they are not grammatical elements that strictly express morphological changes. For example, "we" and "representatives" mean the majority, but the "representatives" of "we" can also mean the majority. Although some verbs and adjectives in modern Chinese can overlap, such as "discuss, discuss, and be beautiful", this is not a morphological change, but it is not universal.

The arrangement of word order has a great influence on structure and meaning. For example:

Here comes the guest.

Here comes the guest.

The moonlight flowed into the house

There was moonlight in the room.

Different word order leads to different structural relations and different emphases.

The use of function words also has a great influence on the structure and meaning. For example:

Grain production increased.

Increasing grain production

Peking University.

Universities in Beijing.

The use of function words is different in structure or meaning.

Schools and farms.

The school farm.

If you choose more than ten burdens, you will not choose.

It took more than ten to choose.

(2) The structural principles of words, phrases and sentences are basically the same.

Modern Chinese does not have the same sentence and phrase structure as Indo European. For example, the predicate part of an English sentence requires a main verb (mainverb) filled by a finite verb, and the finite verb is not allowed in the phrase; In modern Chinese, the principles of sentence and phrase are consistent. The same subject predicate phrase can be used as a sentence or a sentence component. Whether morphemes form words, words form phrases, or phrases form sentences, there are five basic grammatical structure relationships: subject predicate, verb object, complement, partial positive and combination. For example, a subject predicate structure in Chinese can be a sentence or a phrase. It is the same with verb object structure, verb complement structure and partial positive structure. The word "Moon", the phrase "Hello everyone", the sentence "the sun is rising." And so on are subject predicate structures.

(3) Part of speech and syntactic components are not simply corresponding.

Unlike Indo European languages, modern Chinese has a simple one-to-one correspondence between parts of speech and sentence elements. For example, in Indo European, nouns correspond to subjects and objects, and adjectives correspond to attributes. In Chinese, the relationship between parts of speech and sentence elements is complex. The same part of speech can act as multiple syntactic elements. In modern Chinese, nouns can act as subjects and objects, and other elements. Adjectives can act as attributes and other elements. Words are multi-functional in grammar; On the contrary, the same sentence component can be served by several types of words, and there is a certain degree of flexibility between them, so there is not a simple corresponding relationship between parts of speech and syntactic components as in Indo European.

(4) There are many quantifiers, including modal particles.

There are many quantifiers in modern Chinese. When counting, one quantifier is usually used after the numeral, and the quantifiers used by different nouns are often different. Such as "a rope, a horse, a cow, a table, a rainbow" and so on. Modal particles are also well-developed, which can formalize various mood colors in sentences. Modal particles often appear at the end of a sentence, indicating the subtle differences of various moods, such as "you go（ Let's go（ You are gone（ Statement) ".