Grammaticalization Of The Chinese Temporal Adverb Lao

The Chinese character"老"(pinyin lao3) falls into two parts of speech, that is both an adverb concerning time and is also an adjective. This Chinese character appears frequently in the usage of adverbs. According to the research of Lu Jian Ming and Ma Zhen (1985), it stated,"Out of about 130 adverbs in the modern Chinese language, this adverb concerning time appears about 30% of the time."Therefore, it is considered as one of the important adverbs.In teaching Chinese to foreigners, we were often asked about the usage of the Chinese character,"老"as to the differences between"老朋友"(pinyin lao3 peng2 you3), meaning"old friends"and"老迟到"(pinyin lao3 chi2 dao4), meaning"often late."Of course, the Chinese character"老"as in"老朋友"is used as an adjective, whereas, the Chinese character"老"as in"老迟到"is used as an adverb.In recent years, the research on the grammatical aspect of the Chinese language has gained popularity, and, gradually has been the focus at home and around the world.This paper is produced after a thorough grammatical analysis of 29303 sentences consisting of the Chinese character"老"from the corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU(CCL).This thesis is mainly on the research of the Chinese character"老".The research will be on the history of this Chinese character, its development and more importantly on the Zhang Yi Sheng (2000)grammatical aspect.As a result,we have some conclusions:What the reasons for the time adverb"老"come out are three ones: function; metaphormechanism .differentiation.On the function is dvided three reasons,and what the metaphormechanism's effect is through"long time"caused differentiation.,and the differentiation caused the time adverb"老"grammaticalization.