Band 2

Dorothea Wippermann

Liandongshi. Der Begriff der Verbalserie in der chinesischen Linguistik

Diese Arbeit leistet einen Beitrag zur Erforschung syntaktischer Strukturen der modernen chinesischen Sprache, die von chinesischen Grammatikern unter dem Stichwort "Verbalserie" (liandongshi) zusammengefaßt werden. Es erfolgt eine ausführliche Klärung und kritische Diskussion des Begriffes der Verbalserie in der chinesischen Linguistik und es wird ein neuer Ansatz zur Beschreibung der betreffenden Strukturen vorgestellt. Anhand von kontrastiven Untersuchungen wird das in der einschlägigen Literatur häufig vertretene Postulat von der Verbalserie als einer Besonderheit der chinesischen Sprache überprüft. Es zeigt sich, daß in anderen Sprachen, insbesondere im Deutschen und anderen westeuropäischen Sprachen, durchaus äquivalente Strukturen existieren, die als Sonderformen der Verbalkoordination gelten können.

Dorothea Wippermann

Liandongshi. The Concept of the Serial Verb Construction in Chinese Linguistics

This book is a study of modern standard Chinese syntax dealing with the so-called "serial verb constructions" (liandongshi). Through a detailed clarification and critical discussion of the concept of serial verbs in Chinese linguistics, it is shown that there exists a strong tendency to treat any sequence of verbal phrases as serial verb constructions without sufficiently regarding the great diversity of the inherent structures. This turns out to be a tendency also found in some works of western general linguistics concerning serial verbs in languages other than Chinese. The author introduces a new attempt at the analysis and description of the Chinese structures concerned, which leads to the conclusion that Chinese serial verb constructions can be assigned to all sorts of syntactic structures, the coordinative construction being the most important one. In examining the common postulate of the uniqueness of the Chinese serial verb construction, a contrastive analysis considering German and English language data is carried out, which reveals that European languages possess structures which can be regarded as structural equivalents of the Chinese constructions in question.

In considering the serial verb construction, many other related problems of Chinese linguistics are discussed, for example the complement, the distiniction of verbs and prepositions, verbal aspect, the so-called predicative sentence structures, simple and complex sentences, intonation phenomena, punctuation problems and other questions.

The book contains numerous Chinese examples which are provided with word for word translations that may enable linguists or other interested readers with no knowledge of Chinese to follow the argumentation.

The result of this study may not only be of interest for the research of Chinese syntax, but also contain some information which may prove to be useful for students of contrastive linguistics, translators or teachers of Chinese as a foreign language.

The author, who has studied sinology, general linguistics and German language and literature at the Universities of Cologne, Bonn, Trier and Nanking, has been since 1984 engaged in teaching and researching at the Department of Sinology of the University of Trier.