國語語法與功用解釋：兼談國語與英語功用語法的對比分析

FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATIONS IN CHINESE SYNTAX: WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF CHINESE AND ENGLISH

The present paper attempts to provide plausible explanations for Chinese sentences which are cognitively synonymous yet superficially different. Altogether 18 sentence struc-tures in Chinese along with their variant forms are discussed and their communicative functions explained on the basis of four principles: From Old to New Principle (a prag-matic principle)， From Light to Heavy Principle (a rhythmic principle)， From Low to High Principle (a syntactic principle)， and Prom Close to Distant Principle (an empathy princi-ple). Furthermore， these same principles have been applied to the corresponding sentence structures in English to investigate whether similar sentence constructions in the two lan-guages perform similar communicative functions.