Subjectification In Chinese Coordinating Conjunction

Subjectificaiton, as the diachronic facet of subjectivity, has raised in the last two decades a number of interesting questions in grammaticalizaiton and semantic change theory. There is consensus that the concept of (inter)subjectification does indeed characterize the changes that such words undergo in their historical development (cf. Traugott and Dahser,2002; Athanasiadou et al.,2006). In this thesis, the path of semantic change of the coordinating conjunction in Modern Mandarin from their roots in Old Chinese will be investigated by adopting Traugott and Dasher’s(2002) Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC) in the present corpus-based study to show that coordinating conjunctions have developed through successive stages attributed to (inter)subjectification. Due to the scarcity of utilizing the new theory IITSC to analyze Chinese data, this study reports on GEN in order to investigate the path of subjectification of the Chinese coordinating conjunctions in Modern Mandarin from their roots in Old Chinese. Concretely, the objective of this study is twofold.First, we will examine how and why subjectification process happens in the diachronic evolution of Chinese coordinators. The Chinese corpus (from500B.C. to present) is exploited to show the use of GEN at different stages of Chinese language as well as the semantic and syntactic changes accompanying their historical development. While most of the recent studies of semantic change in Chinese focus on grammaticalization or pragmaticalization from verbs to grammatical markers (Yan 2003, McElvenny2006, Wang and Tsai2007, etc.), the present study will show that the Modern Mandarin coordinators have developed through successive stages of subjectification so as to confirm the applicability of Traugott and Dasher’s model of semantic change into Chinese.Second, two types of semantic change are commonly recognized in the English-speaking world:metaphorization and metonymization. Traugott and Dasher (2002) also include subjectification and intersubjectification as major in their IITSC model for semantic change. However, they did not propose an accurately and clearly concept definition about the relations among metaphorization, metonymization and (inter)subjectification. Thus, the relationship of these three mechanisms will be examined in this present paper but not as a key point while the first objective will be the focus. We will draw a clear line of demarcation among metaphorization, metonymization and (inter)subjectification and to indicate the correlation of them through the study of Chinese evidences.The significance of the present study lies in what follows:For one thing, based on the Chinese corpus of PKU, this thesis delves the diachronic evolution of GEN and gives a detailed description of their distributions, semantic and syntactic characteristics at various stage of the Chinese language, in which subjectification accounts for a lot.For another thing, we exploit the mechanisms involved in the historical development of GEN and reach a conclusion that metaphorizaition and metonymization can be classified as different categories of subjectificaiton.As such, we expect the present thesis will contribute a little to the Traugott and Dasher’s Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC) by drawing Chinese into consideration in verifying the validity of a new theory of semantic change. The historical development of Chinese coordinating conjunctions will be shown by adopting subjectificaiton for the sake of offering a reasonable and persuasive explanation of semantic change in Chinese coordinators. By the same token, our understanding of subjectification will be deepened through the present study.