The Diachronic Evolution And Grammaticalization Of "Wei"

"Wei" is a common word in Chinese language.It was a notional word with diverse meanings and functions in the pre-Qin period,then gradually became affixed in modern Chinese,whose grammatical functions and meanings changed as well.This is a language phenomenon worthy of attention in the language study.Based on the relevant corpus investigation and theories of grammaticalization,this paper discusses the detailed evolution process,motivation and mechanism of "Wei".The main content of this paper is divided into three parts.The first part explores the origin,investigates the original meaning,determines its core meaning and sorts out the meaning evolution of "Wei" during the period from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese."Wei" originally contains two basic meanings: the original meaning of "hidden" and the core meaning of "small,fine,little".which extended and generalized to the other rest of meanings.So the meaning of "Wei" has undergone a process of expansion and reduction during the period from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese.The second part discusses the grammaticalization process of "Wei" and describes its grammaticalization motivation and mechanism.There are three paths of grammaticalization of "Wei",which are verb grammatically converted into adverb,adjective grammatically converted into adverb and finally grammatically converted quasiaffix in modern Chinese.The motivation of the grammaticalization mainly includes syntactic environment,semantic conditions and pragmatic factors,while the mechanism of grammaticalization is mainly metaphor,reanalysis and analogy.The third part analyzes the grammaticalization features of "Wei".There are several rules such as unidirectivity,coexistence,unbalance and gradualism in the grammaticalization process of "Wei".The word meaning changes from pratical to virtual,which reflects the rule of unidirectivity.The old and new grammatical forms coexist for a long time in the evolution of "Wei",which reflects the rule of coexistence.The useages of different grammatical functions of "Wei" are different,which reflects the the rule ofimbalance."Wei" has an intermediate stage of ambiguous meaning during the period of a form to another form,which reflects the rule of gradualism.