Preliminary notes on a study of two subjects in a Chinese sentence

Abstract. This paper contains an overview of the specific concept of two subjects in a sentence, over the last decades this concept of the Chinese syntax has become widely spread. This idea has been proposed in order to explain the relationship between two noun groups at the very beginning of a sentence in the preposition to the verb and comes from one of the special constructions in the Chinese language – S-P predicate. “Subject-predicate predicate sentence” is barely known to a wide audience outside of China. As a sentence pattern of modern Chinese this type of sentence has already been generally accepted by Chinese linguists. Using the most important work of Chinese researchers at the base this paper shows how the linguistic discussion has shifted from using a criterion of semantic relations between a noun and a verb to the idea of priority of the positional criterion when analyzing the structure of syntax units. The logical and semantic approach to sentence initially borrowed into Chinese linguistics from the grammar of western languages in the mid-XX century was replaced by a specific concept of organization of syntactic units in a sentence as “Two subjects sentence” and this may complicate the acquisition of Chinese as L2.

Keywords: two subjects sentence, S-P predicate sentence, subject-predicate predicate sentence, subject⁃predicate structure as the predicate in Chinese, subject-predicate group, syntactical classification, Chinese grammar, sentence pattern in Chinese

For citation: Emelchenkova E.N. Preliminary notes on a study of two subjects in a Chinese sentence. Modern Oriental Studies. 2023; Volume 5 (1). (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.24412/2686-9675-1-2023-6-23