A Diachronic Study On The Quantitative Expression Of Chinese Degree Semantics

As a semantic category,degree can be expressed by many linguistic means.Quantifier is one of the important ways to express the semantics of degree.Based on semantic grammar,grammaticalization and lexicalization,this paper investigates the types,syntactic collocation and diachronic development of Chinese degree semantic quantitative expression.Through case study and analysis,this paper systematically and comprehensively investigates the semantic evolution model of “ quantity >degree ” in historical Chinese,and discusses the motivation and mechanism of its evolution.In addition to the“Introduction”and“conclusion”,the paper is divided into four chapters.The “ Introduction ” defines the research object of this paper,introduces the research status of“degree semantic quantitative expression”from the two levels of“the relationship between degree,quantity and quantity category”and“case study”,explains the research purpose,research significance,research methods and corpus sources of this paper.The first chapter is an overview of quantitative expression,which mainly discusses the types,grammatical functions and characteristics of quantitative expression of degree semantics.According to whether it is a word or not,quantitative expression can be divided into“vocabulary”and“frame”,“frame”are different from frame structure and frame construction.On this basis,we investigated the syntactic and combinatorial functions of different types of quantitative expressions,and analyzed the prominent characteristics of these expressions compared with other degree semantic expressions.The second chapter examines the development and evolution of quantitative expression of vocabulary and frame structure from a diachronic perspective,focusing on the study of high-order quantitative expression forms.It is considered that quantitative words with [+majority] [+large] [+full] [+complete] semantic characteristics are easier to evolve to degree adverbs.There are two main paths of semantic evolution: “ quantity / category > quantity > degree ” and “ quantity >summary > degree”.The third chapter is cases study,which mainly discusses the four representative quantitative framework constructions of“one hundred + X”“one meal + X”“one belly+ X ” and “ all kinds of + X ”,comprehensively investigates their constituent components,construction meaning,syntactic function and pragmatic characteristics,and analyzes their formation and development process and motivation mechanism.The fourth chapter summarizes the motivation and mechanism of the evolution of quantitative expression.The motivation mainly includes two levels: language and cognitive psychology.The former includes semantic basis,syntactic environment,pragmatic value and use frequency,and the latter includes pragmatic reasoning and novelty seeking psychology.The formation mechanism is mainly analogy and re analysis.