Semantic Change And Grammaticalization Of Additive Markers

Additivity,a type of logical relation,is commonly used in our life.Among domestic academic researches,however,the relevant studies on additive markers mainly focus on the application of English learners’ writing.Few researches on English and Chinese additive markers have been made from the perspective of diachronic semantic change,let alone grammaticalization.This thesis will take additive marker “further(more)” and its Chinese counterpart construction “XXwai”as cases.Synchronically and diachronically,the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts(HC),the Dictionary of Old English Corpus(DOEC),the Middle English Compendium(MEC),the Brown Corpus(BROWN),the British National Corpus(BNC),the Corpus of Historical American English(COHA),the Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU Corpus(CCLC)and the Chinese National Corpus(CNC)are used to demonstrate the semantic change and grammaticalization of these two additive markers by qualitative and later quantitative analyses,in an aim to explain the following two questions:(1)What semantic changes have English “further(more)” and Chinese “XXwai”undergone respectively?(2)What are the differences between English “further(more)” and Chinese“XXwai” in their grammaticalization processes and what are the cognitive motivation behind them?The findings of this thesis are as follows: grammaticalization of “further(more)”and “XXwai” started in Old English and Remote Ancient Times respectively,seeing that the semantics of “further(more)” changed from spatial domain to time domain and then degree domain,while Chinese “XXwai” has undergone a slightly different transformation: from the spatial domain to time domain and then scope domain.The opportunity for “further(more)” to acquire the additive meaning comes from the occurrence of the sense “more” in Old English,which embodies the continuity of time and space forward(or in the future).While the additive sense of “XXwai”originates from the occurrence of its “exclusive” sense in Middle Ancient Times.The motivations of these changes can be explained by conceptual metaphor theory.This thesis finds that “further(more)” has two grammaticalization paths,one is grammaticalized from the vertical sense “up” to the time sense “past”,and then the degree sense “priority”,but all of them have been no longer in use.The other one is from horizontal sense “front” to time sense “future”,degree sense “deepening and continuing” to logical sense “additivity”.When it comes to conceptual metaphor from space to time,“further(more)” has experienced the transformation from TIME MOVING Metaphor to EGO MOVING Metaphor.The projection from the spatial domain to the logical domain can be explained by the CONTAINER Metaphor.Therefore,“further(more)” denotes a progressive meaning as an additive marker.As for “XXwai”,there is only one grammaticalization path,which is changing from spatial meaning to temporal meaning,and scope meaning to logic meaning.The transformation from spatial domain to time domain,and spatial domain to logical domain are all realized by the CONTAINER Metaphor: the former regards time as a container,while the latter regards topic as a container.Therefore,though both are additive markers,“XXwai” shows more of a supplementary sense compared to“further(more)”.