Diachronic Study On Semantic Evolution Of Chinese Classifier Zhang

’Zhang’,as a typical individual quantifier of modern Chinese,has been paid close attention by broad scholars.However,studies on ’zhang’ is limited to single perspective,like the evolution,or its collocation,which does not shed any light on its systematic and comprehensive explosion.The current research status mainly explained the semantic evolution of ’zhang’ from the action sememes,plane meaning,two-dimensional characters and three-dimensional characters.If we try to explain the evolution of language from only one certain perspective,we can not come to a perfect conclusion.This thesis is going to systematically summarize ’zhang’,the quantifier of modern Chinese,from diachronic and cognitive perspective.Based on analysis of the evolutionary mechanism of ’zhang’.We are trying to explain its emergence and development from the state meaning on the basis of verb meaning.Based on this idea and former studies,this thesis places its stress mainly on the following research questions:(1)What is the semantic feature of ’zhang’?(2)How does ’zhang’ evolve from a verb to a classifier?(3)What is the evolvement mechanism of ’zhang’ and how many stages of its structural adjustment?Through analyzing former researches and collecting corpus,we find that the answers to above questions can be presented as follows:first,this paper is based on the verb meaning of this word and by analyzing its relative corpus.we find a state feature during the evolution process of ’zhang’.Second,we classify its semantic features into three stages:[+do];[+do,+state]and[-do,+state];and[-do,-state].Last,this thesis explains the influence of[+state]feature of’zhang’ on its semantic evolutionary process,illustrates its historical semantic evolution in each dynasty,and summarizes the characteristics of the objects alleged by ’zhang’.Furthermore,the overview of the structural adjustment of Chinese classifier ’zhang’ from pre-Qin dynasty to the period of the Republic of China is provided:’zhang’+noun;’zhang’ +noun(extension);noun+numeral+’zhang’;numeral+’zhang’+noun.