CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 The subject of the research 1
1.1.1 The Ba-construction in discourse 2
1.1.2 The diachronic development of the Ba-construction 4
1.2 Theoretical assumptions 5
1.2.1 Language as a communicative instrument—Functionalism in linguistics 5
1.2.2 Language as a cognitive activity—Cognitive linguistics 7
1.2.3 A functional-cognitive integrated approach 8
1.3 Research objectives 12
1.4 Research approaches 13
1.4.1 Research approach to the meaning of the Ba-construction 14
1.4.2 Research approach to the English realizations of the Ba-construction 15
1.5 Outline of the study 17
CHAPTER TWO REVIEW OF LITERATURE 19
2.1 Ideational meaning 20
2.1.1 Disposal and the verb in the Ba-construction 20
2.1.2 Disposal and the verb-object relations in the Ba-construction 24
2.1.3 Topic-comment approach 25
2.1.4 Cognitive approaches 27
2.2 Interpersonal meaning 31
2.3 Textual meaning 34
2.3.1 The information structure ofthe Ba-construction 34
2.3.2 The cohesive function of the Ba-construction 38
2.3.3 The semantic context of the Ba-construction 41
2.4 Summary and critical evaluation 45
2.4.1 Summary of understandings of the meaning of the Ba-construction 45
2.4.2 Critical evaluations of the previous studies 48
CHAPTER THREE THEORETICAL HYPOTHESES AND RESEARCH FRAMEWORKS 54
3.1 Some hypotheses of the meaning of the Ba-construction 54
3.1.1 General hypotheses 54
3.1.2 Specific hypotheses 57
3.2 Research frameworks 59
3.2.1 Causative semantics and the ideational meaning of the Ba-construction 60
3.2.2 Appraisal Theory and the interpersonal meaning of the Ba-construction 71
3.2.3 Discourse measurements of topic continuity and the textual meaning of the Ba-construction 76
3.3 Summary 80
CHAPTER FOUR RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 81
4.1 Research questions 81
4.2 Data 82
4.2.1 The normal Chinese-to-English translation corpus 83
4.2.2 The special Chinese-to-English translation corpus 84
4.2.3 The English-to-Chinese parallel corpus 85
4.3 Variables design 85
4.3.1 Variables for describing Chinese data 86
4.3.2 Variables for describing English data 128
4.4 Research procedure 135
4.4.1 Sample collection 135
4.4.2 Variable application 137
4.4.3 Data treatment 139
CHAPTER FIVE RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 144
5.1 Investigation of the ideational meaning of the Ba-construction and its English realizations 144
5.1.1 General observation and discussion 144
5.1.2 Description of the Ba-construction with different causative semantic features and its potential English realizations 147
5.1.3 Summary 216
5.2 Investigation of the attitudinal meaning of the Ba-construction and its English realizations 219
5.2.1 General observation and discussion 219
5.2.2 Description of the attitudes generally conveyed by the Ba-construction 222
5.2.3 Summary 226
5.3 Investigation of the textual meaning of the Ba-construction and its English realizations 226
5.3.1 General observation and discussion 226
5.3.2 Description of the main topics in the Ba-construction and their discourse behaviors 230
5.3.3 Summary 235
5.4 General discussion:the meaning of the Ba-construction and its distinctiveness 236
5.5 General discussion:the role of the Ba-construction in Modern Chinese 238
CHAPTER SIX CONCLUSION 242
6.1 Summary 242
6.1.1 Answers to Research Question One 242
6.1.2 Answers to Research Question Two 243
6.2 Implications 244
6.2.1 Implication of the research approach 244
6.2.2 Implication of the empirical research method 246
6.2.3 Implication of the contrastive study 247
6.3 Limitations and recommendations 248
6.3.1 Limitations of the present study 248
6.3.2 Recommendations for future research 249
BIBLIOGRAPHY 251
APPENDICES 259