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Chapter One   Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study  
In  the  system  of  lexical  category  in  Mandarin,  adjectives  have  always  been surrounded  by  controversies.  Because  of  their  variety  in  morphology  and  syntax,  the boundaries among adjectives, nouns and verbs are not very clear. Most scholars hold the idea  that  the  main  syntactic  function  of  the  adjectives  in  Mandarin  is  to  act  as  an attribute or predicate.  But  the  scholars  maintaining  that  the  typical  syntactic  role  of  adjectives  is  to function as an predicate tend to regard adjectives as the subclass of the generalized verb category. Different from nouns and verbs, adjectives can not be included in the category of  content  words.  However,  scholars  insisting  that  adjectives  are  typically  used  as modifiers  in  the  sentence  narrow  down  the  range  of  adjectives  and  they  believe  that some adjectives in traditional sense are excluded from the category of adjectives. In  order  to  end  this  dispute,  Shen  Jiaxuan  (1997)  makes  a  clear  demonstration  of the  relationship  between  adjectives  and  syntactic  components  with  the  help  of Markedness  Theory.  It  is  the  unmarked  mode  that  qualitative  adjectives are used to be modifiers and descriptive adjectives function as predicates in sentences. Things will be different  if  descriptive  adjectives  and  qualitative  adjectives  change  their  roles  in sentences, that is to say, it will be a marked mode that qualitative adjectives function as predicate  and  descriptive  adjectives  are  used  as  modifiers  in  a  sentence.  Therefore  the typical  and  non-marked  adjectives  in  Mandarin  are  qualitative  adjectives,  and  it  is evident that the typical syntactic function of adjectives in Mandarin is to be used as an attribute.
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1.2 Objectives of the Study  
This  thesis,  taking  adjective-object  construction  in  Mandarin  as  the  study  object, tries to achieve the following three objectives. To  begin  with,  a  relatively  small  corpus  of  adjective-object  construction  will  be built in order to ensure concrete number of adjectives which can take objects, including monosyllabic adjectives and disyllabic adjectives. In the next place, in order to explain the production mechanism of adjective-object construction,  this  thesis  tries  to  build  a  theoretical  framework  based  on  the decategorization  theory,  process  predication  of  language,  metonymy  and  salience principle to make本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。