Regularity and Flexibility of Grammatical Constructions
Fan Xiao · Hanyu xuexi · 2007
There have been two opposite ideas about Chinese grammar:one believes that Chinese grammar has set rules;the other thinks that Chinese grammar is flexible and has no definite rules to be followed.This paper argues that grammar has both regularity and flexibility.They are dialectic:regularity is static and relatively fixed,and flexibility is dynamic and absolutely changing.Therefore the so called “grammatical knowledge” should contain these two aspects.Based on the facts showing that these two aspects exist on the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic levels,this paper points out that grammatical study should include both general rules and flexibilities in use and that we should treat these two aspects dialectically,emphasizing that flexibilities also contain certain rules.