Syntactical Features of Proverbs with the Complex Sentence Structure in Chinese

Abstract

The article addresses the study of the syntactic structure of Chinese proverbs, which have their own grammatical features. The relevance of this study is determined by the linguistic value of folk aphorisms, and the insufficient study of Chinese proverbs with complex sentence structure. The purpose of the article is to identify syntactical peculiarities of complex sentences in the paremiological stock of the Chinese language. The material for this paper was Chinese proverbs with subordination, selected by the method of continuous sampling, from the collection of Chinese folk sayings. The methodology of the study involves recourse to descriptive and interpretive methods, sampling method, as well as structural-semantic, component and contextual analysis. The study of the empirical material revealed that proverbs, as complete units of utterance, are characterized by a structural diversity of predicative parts within the complex. The most numerous of them are complex sentences with the meaning of condition. Some connectives, characteristic of written speech, are not used in oral folk utterances. The absence of the subject of action emphasizes the generalization of the content of proverbs, their different address or temporal orientation.