A Diachronic Study Of Chinese Directional Verbs “Lai” And “Qu” From The Perspective Of Nanosyntax

Directional verbs are rich in meaning and diverse in structure and have always been a hot topic of discussion in the field of linguistics.At present,the research on directional verbs mainly focuses on their semantics or reference points,but the study of the evolution of directional verbs from a diachronic perspective is still rare.Nanosyntax is a newly emerging syntactic theory in recent years.Its principle of fine distinction and combination of syntactic features provides a powerful theoretical tool for the study of the diachronic evolution of Chinese directional verbs.Therefore,this paper intends to use Nanosyntax as a theoretic framework to analyze the diachronic evolution of the directional verbs “lai” and “qu” in different periods and summarize the diachronic evolution path of these two verbs.Firstly,the syntactic structures of “lai” and “qu” in seven different dynasties are studied in detail based on the Corpus of State Language Commission,and the usage of the two directional verbs in modern Chinese is also cared.The syntactic structures in which the two directional verbs occur are divided into two main categories: one is that in which they act as predicates while the other is that in which they act as directional complements,and the cases of “lai” and“qu” as predicates are further divided into two categories: that in which they are used predicates alone and that in which they are used in serial verb constructions.In addition,the paper also lists other structures in which “lai” and “qu” can occur,such as “lai” or “qu” as attributives,modal particles or auxiliary words.Secondly,based on the three technical tools of Nanosyntactic theory,namely spellout,principles and tools,this paper analyzes the fine-grained features contained in the directional verbs “lai” and “qu”,and summarizes the diachronic evolution path of these two directional verbs over time.Based on the Nanosyntax theory and the analyses of the features contained in “lai” and“qu”,we find that the diachronic evolution of directional verbs “lai” and “qu” generally follows two paths.On the one hand,“lai” and “qu” display an increasing number of features from the Spring and Autumn period to the present.Features concerned include √GO,DEIXIS,PATH,CAUSE and APPLICATIVE.On the other hand,features are also found to be gradually reduced from several features to only one feature of DEIXIS from the Spring and Autumn period to Tang and Five Dynasties.