On The Diachronic Development And Grammaticalization Of Duplicated Descriptives

In Archaic Chinese, duplicated descriptive was an independent word-class, but afterwards duplicated descriptives came into certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continued to become suffix. The processes whereby these change occured were known as grammaticalization. The present paper is a description of the diachroriic development of duplicated descriptives, and studies the motivations and mechanisms of grammaticalization of duplicated descriptives. Finally, a fresh thinking of ours on grammticalization is proposed. From a historical perspective, the grammaticalization of duplicated descriptives can be thought of as a dine along which forms evolve: content item> grammatical word > clitic > suffix. Each item to the right is more clearly grammatical and less lexical than its partner to the left. At the beginning, the duplicated descriptives acted as discourse components, which were random and temporary. And with the maturity of rhyme scheme of verse, duplicated descriptives obtained fixed forms and became syntactic components. At the end, under the double pressure of both duplicated adjectives and the ABB structure, duplicated descriptive were forced to be lexical components. The various stages of grammaticalization of duplicated descriptives coexist in Modem Chinese, although the change originated in the fourteenth century or perhaps even earlier. Owing to its entering the ABB structures, duplicated descriptives accomplished grarnmaticalization. As a result of the suppress of external syntactic situation, the internal syntactic relations of duplicated descriptives changed a lot; at the same time, some of the original relatively concrete meanings of duplicated descriptives have been lost, however, some new meanings have also been added, which were more abstract and speaker-based meanings, specifically temporal meanings based in speaker time. Because of these above-mentioned reasons,when the ABB structures degradated to be lexical components, duplicated descriptives were no longer independent, but must be bound as a suffix, that is, duplicated iii descriptives were constrained to occurring next to an autonomous, e.g., adjective, noun and verb, known as the host. Thus it is obvious that the ABB structures are the carriers of grammaticalizaton of duplicated descriptives. The full text is divided into four parts. The first part will introduce some background knowledge with regard to descriptives, including duplicated descriptives. The second part will make a specific comparative study between duplicated descriptives in pre-Qin times, in Yuan dynasty and in Modem Chinese from grmmatical functional point of view Based on the comprehensive study, the third part will analyze why and how grammaticalization of duplicated descriptives took place. In particular, this paper attempts to answer the questions: what motivates grammaticalization, in the first place, what mechanisms lead to it, what are its probable paths of the progression through time, and what are its end results? The fourth part will put forward language proof coming from the Sino-Tibetan as a support of the conclusion drawn by combing though the di~chronic development of duplicated descriptives. Descriptive is a kind of word-class characteristic of Sino-Tibetan, which couldn抰 be covered by the word-class system of Indo-European. From Ma抯 Grammar, the first Chinese gra...