Abstract
Ready-madeness, discreteness and psychological reality of language community are the objective standards that define basic structural unit in a language. It is zi in the Chinese language that conforms to these standards. As the smallest structural unit with motivation in Chinese, zi adheres to its function of expressing meaning with consistent adamancy. So the grammar on the basis of zi can only be semantic-syntax, whose generative mechanism is that, on the basis of nuclear zi, a zi can be expanded to be zi-groups of different ranks through endocentric or exocentric structural forms. The vocabulary meaning of zi-groups can be divided into two kinds: coordinative and subordinative. And four-zi pattern such as “kai-tian-pi-di” is just the result of mixing of these two kinds of meaning. Among the grammatical meanings of zi-group, the agentive and causative are the most important ones because they are the structural basis in generating a sentence in the Chinese language. When several zi-groups form a sentence, some circumstantial or pragmatic factors that are implicit at first would permeate the structure of the sentence. Therefore, it is necessary to find the juncture among zi-groups, i.e. the category of definiteness, when a sentence is generated. Definiteness is mainly manifested as the topic of initial part or the structural component that can be put at the initial part to function as the topic. Agentiveness and causativeness are the basic semantic relations within “topic-comment”. And the verb-complement construction and the serial verb construction in modern grammar are the historical variations of causative pattern in ancient Chinese.
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