고대 중국어의 초점 유형 및 초점 표현 방식

Abstract

This thesis examines the types of focus and expression ways of ancient Chinese. The focus has complementary relationships with topic, presupposition, or ground, as an axis of consisting of an information structure, which is the part that the speaker emphasizes the most in the sentence. Lambrecht(1994) classified ‘focus structure’ into predicate-focus structure, argument-focus structure, and sentence-focus structure. This study also classified the focus structure of ancient Chinese based on the structure, mentioned above. The predicate focus structure is located in the predicate where the focus is presented with new information. The argument focus structure is located on the noun phrase which is an argument, where the focus is emphasized regardless of the sentence final and the sentence initial. The entire sentence becomes new information and focus in the sentence-focus structure. Ancient Chinese makes use of the syntactic means; focus marker, word order shift, and ellipsis, to express the focus. In the first place, focus markers, 之 and 是 are inserted to emphasize the object components with which are contrasted. Second, the focus of ancient Chinese is also influenced by the movement of the word order shift. For example, a predicate part is pre-modified in front of the subject, or the object is pre-modified in front of the predicate part. As well, the prepositional phrase are pre-modified or post-modified in front of the predicate or in the rear of predicate. Finally, in ancient Chinese, old information is often omitted to stand out new information with high information value.