A Study On The Sources And Grammaticalization Of Chinese Future Markers

The dissertation focuses on the markers of future tense in Chinese history in prototype and grammaticalization theories. The future markers, based on ancient Chinese, are the following key often-used characters:“欲”,“当”,“会”,“要”,“将”,“行”,“垂”,“待”,“来”,“其”,“且”and“方”. Their sources and grammaticalization process are examined thoroughly with the purpose to discover the motivation why different characters can play predominant roles to express the future time in different historical periods,along with the features which make these characters evolve into the future markers.Every future marker in Chinese listed above is investigated, ranging from the time of appearance, the development to the motivation and mechanism through grammaticalization.This dissertation is composed of seven chapters. The main content of each chapter is listed as following:Chapter One: Introduction. In this chapter, the future tense is explained, the future point is defined rigidly, the previous pertinent research on future tense and future markers devoted by experts and scholars is overviewed. Also, the research content, objectives, the data as well as methodology are introduced briefly.Chapter Two: The future markers originated from the modal verbs. This part discusses four characters “欲”,“当”,“会”,“要” respectively. According to their frequency of use and the length of time, “欲”is in the first place to be used highly frequently and lasted for a long time, the second is “当”, the third is“要”, and the last is “会”. More specifically, “欲”and“要”belong to the desire modal verbs equivalent to “want” in English, while“当”and“会”fall into the obligation equivalent to “shall”. Thus, that indicates the characters entailed the similar or identical meanings are likely to be grammaticalized into the similar and identical functional words. This grammaticalization trend can be confirmed by the other languages and Chinesedialects.Chapter Three: The future markers derived from the andative verbs. This section studies the use and grammaticalization of “将”and“行”. The former is used more frequently than the latter. In middle age Chinese, “将” was grammaticalized into dispositive markers and concomitant preposition. Owing to its various functions, “ 将 ”was used less frequently while the use of“欲”,“当”,“垂”became more and more popular. This example shows that words which contain too many functions may lose some original meanings or functions.The analysis above reveals that some motive verbs can be grammaticalized into future markers in given structures in many languages. One of the typical example is “be going to” which is grammaticalized into “be gonna” in English. More examples can be found easily in other languages, such as “gann” in Dutch,“aller” in French, “ya” in Zuru and so on.Chapter Four: The future markers come from venitive verbs. This portion focuses on three characters “垂”,“待”,“来”. These characters were not active in history as the future markers, yet their grammaticalization as future markers reflects the other cognitive views of human beings. That is to say, the object is the center of motionlessness, while the people walks close to the object. In other words,that indicates ’going’ or ’coming’ motion in reference to a particular location or person This is the common cognitive base of the words grammaticalization into future markers.Chapter Five: The future markers come from other sources. This part investigates three characters “其”,“且”,“方”which are hard to definite their sources.“其”cannot be studied in detail owing to long history and insufficient data although it appeared most early as the future marker. “且”entails a strong dialectic sense. In Warring State period, it was used widely in Qin’s documents which are difficult to collect. Despite of little resource and lack of detailed display of grammaticalization, the hypothesis is still asserted based on the material at hand.Chapter Six: The investigation of category of the future markers. The languages of minorities and other dialects in China express the future tense through many methods. The result is that most of languages in China adopt the analytic method to express the future tense. The future markers of this type are lexical. Some languages adopt the synthetic method to express the future tense. Thus, their degrees of morphologization are various. For example, some languages use the suffixes, some change the pronunciation. The question of languages which have different degrees on morphologization are worth deep researching.Chapter Seven: Conclusion. The content and main achievements of this dissertation are summarized. Attentions should be paid to two aspects:Firstly, the reasons of the future markers which are dying out as well as some new are coming into being along the time. In Chinese history, twelve future markers appear chronologically and the reasons behind this change is not an easy process but a complicated motivation. More specifically, it is easier for the modal verbs and wide- meaning verbs to change into future markers. The appearance and development of each marker follows the set rules. Meanwhile, their disappearance is affected by the other markers.Secondly, the significance of the Chinese future markers in world languages.The Chinese future markers lie ahead of the verbs, and part of those of dialects lie behind the verbs. Both of them appear in words instead of the morphology.Here displays that it is necessary to investigate the future tense in a wider scope,adopting typology theory.