On the Basic Unit of Chinese Texts and the Causes of the Flowing Sentence
Abstract
This paper is trying to determine the basic unit of Chinese texts and analyze the causes of the flowing sentence on this basis. Our definition of the units of texts is the small units bearing pragmatic categories, such as tense, intention/role/mood/modality etc. As to the most and secondly lower units of Chinese text, we give them the name dòu（逗）and jùduàn（句断）respectively.This paper clarifies the prosodic boundary of dòu and jùduàn as well as the correspondence between grammatical form and dòu, jùduàn.This paper concludes that the causes of the flowing sentence are Chinese hasn't the grammatical rank of clause. There are no restricts on grammatical classes to immediate constituents of all phrases in Chinese.
Keywords
the basic unit of Chinese text;prosodic boundaries;dòu;jùduàn;flowing sentence