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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Studies on function words have always been a heated issue in the literature andhave attracted a considerable amount of attention since the vernacular movement in1920s. As a vital part of conjunctions, the he-like conjunction group were describedand explained from different perspectives. On the basis of the report of The LanguageSituation in China (2011), previous studies found that he, yu, tong and gen are themost frequently used out of the seven in the he-like conjunction group (Wu, 2003; Li,2014).In a general sense, the studies of the coordinate conjunctions he and yu havegone through four stages: in the first stage, the preposition-conjunction grammardivision of the he-like function word group was mainly concerned with；in the secondstage, the distinction of he and yu as conjunctions and as prepositions was focused on；in the third stage, the diachronic analysis of conjunctions he and yu was provided；inthe last stage, the actual use of conjunctions he and yu was taken into consideration.In modern Chinese, he is regarded as the coordinate marker that is mostfrequently and typically used (Wu, 2005). Based on the data analysis of Center forChinese Linguistics PKU (CCL), it is shown that more than 2 million coordinatephrases with he as the coordinate conjunction, but about a hundred thousand oneswith yu as the coordinate conjunction. Thus it seems that he is more widely used thanyu. For instance, when “党和国家” was searched as the keyword, more than 7,000coordinate phrases were displayed; while, when “党与国家” was taken as thekeyword in searching, only around 10 coordinate phrases were found. However, thecases of “生和死” and “生与死” were in the opposite way. To be specific, we found88 coordinate phrases with “生和死”, but 546 coordinate phrases with “生与死”. It isdoubtless that he and yu are both coordinate conjunctions that are used to connectcoordinate constituents. Then what factors make the difference between he and yushown above? What will be the pragmatic constraints on the use of them?
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1.2 Research Questions
Based on the findings and limitations of the previous studies, the present studyattempts to fill in the gap by carrying out a qualitative and quantitative research fromthe perspective of Adaptation Theory to provide a pragmatic account of the coordinateconjunctions he and yu.In order to achieve the objectives of the study, this paper tries to answer the threeresearch questions as follows:1. How are the coordinate conjunctions he and yu used in Chinese in terms oftheir distribution?2. What are the similarities and differences in use between he and yu at thelexical, syntactical and semantic level?3. What are the pragmatic constraints on he and yu when their differences areconsidered?Through the quantitative analysis of the script corpora and the TV corpora, thisthesis will focus on the general description about the distribution of the coordinateconjunctions he and yu, on the basis of which, the similarities as well as the differences of the coordinate conjunctions he and yu can be identified. This thenprovides the support for further qualitative discussion. In addition, within theframework of adaptation theory, the pragmatic constraints of the coordinateconjunctions he and yu will be analyzed and discussed in detail.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

This chapter provides the account on previo