| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 語言學研究所 === 86 ===
This thesis aims at exploring the grammatical opposition between the Chinese adverbs zai and you. Through the analysis of the grammatical system mood, the characteristic of Chinese grammar is interpreted, by which how different is Chinese from English or other tense languages in conveying the location of an event is presented.
Both zai and you, being very similar semantically, are usually interpreted as repetition of the former actions or behaviors. However, zai and you are not interchangeable in each other''s discourse contexts, revealing the grammatical contrast between these two adverbs. Location of an event in Mandarin Chinese has been studied by Liu (1996) and Wu (1996) in terms of mood. However, relocation of an event, requiring previous occurrence of the same event before the denoted one, has been less noticed for its grammatical feature. This thesis demonstrates that not only location of an event in Mandarin is grammaticalized, but relocation of an event is grammaticalized as well. Since you and zai are both hypothesized to convey grammatical meanings-i. e. realis vs. irrealis-they are required to be able to encode the acual and non-actual worlds respectively. In addition, these two adverbs can also denote swquentially two different events and are still regualated by the rule of mood, which is taken into consideration, too.
The concept of mood is categorized into realis mood and irrealis mood, encoding different worlds with relation to the actuality of an event. Based on Comrie's (1985) and Chung & Timberlake's (1985) views on the mood languages, the grammatical features embedded in both zai and you are explored.
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