A Study On The Adverbial Usage Of "乃" In Ancient Chines

This thesis aims to describe the adverb ‘nai’(乃)in ’classic Chinese,analyze the grammatical features of its functions,and trace the source of each usage.The paper is divided into five parts,including an introduction and four chapters.The introduction illustrates in brief the research object and the scope of the corpus used in this paper,and reviews the research results achieved until now on ‘nai’(乃).Chapter One discusses the origin and classification of the adverbial function of ‘nai’(乃),and is divided into two parts.The first part discusses the original senses and functional origins of ‘nai’(乃)and ‘nai’(廼)by means of examples both from documents handed down from ancient times and from unearthed documents,explains the characteristics of their uses in early classic Chinese,and expounds the inheritance relationship between ‘nai’(乃)and ‘nai’(廼).The second part is to classify the adverbial functions of ‘nai’(乃),and divides it into time adverb,conjunctive adverbs,modal adverbs and restrictive adverbs from both formal and semantic aspects.Chapter Two to Four mainly analyze the grammatical features of the adverb ‘nai’(乃)in classic Chinese,which is the main body of this thesis.Chapter two discusses the usage of the time adverb ‘nai’(乃),which is divided into two categories: indicating the occurrence time of action and expressing the speaker’s subjective evaluation of the occurrence time.We hold that‘subjectivization’ and the extension of temporal adverbial expressions are the crucial factors that make ‘nai’(乃)produce a function that expresses the speaker’s subjective evaluation.Chapter Three describes the features of the conjunctive adverb ‘nai’(乃)and analyzes the sources of each function.Conjunctive adverbs are the essential use of ‘nai’(乃),which can be divided into four categories: the usage indicating the sequential occurrence of actions in time,the one connecting causal clauses with consequent,the one connecting conditional with consequent,and the one connecting concessive clause with adversative clause.The first section analyzes the functional characteristics and sources of ‘nai’(乃)indicating the sequential occurrence of actions in time,and finds out that based on the usage related to time,‘nai’(乃)has a tendency to develop into a conjunctive adverb to connect causal clauses with consequent.The second section describes the grammatical features of ‘nai’(乃)as the conjunctive adverb connecting causal clause with consequent,and analyzes the generating mechanism of this usage using ‘absorption of context’ and ‘pragmatic inference’.The third section analyzes the grammatical characteristics of ‘nai’(乃)as conjunctive adverb connecting conditional with consequent.In addition,we distinguish ‘nai’(乃)from the conjunction ‘ze’(则),illustrating the similarities and differences between them.The fourth section discusses the origin of ‘nai’(乃)as a conjunctive adverb connecting concessive clause with adversative clause.This kind of usage has appeared in the Western Zhou Dynasty,and was relatively low in frequency compared with the uses mentioned above.We speculate that this usage developed from the former three types of conjunctive ‘nai’(乃).Chapter Four discusses the use of‘nai’(乃)as modal and restrictive adverb.The functions of‘nai’(乃)as modal adverb are:to express surprise,to affirm,and to speculate(in the case of‘wu nai’(无乃)).The key to the classification of‘nai’(乃)as modal adverb is whether‘nai’(乃)can exist out of the context of an adversative clause.It is presumed that it comes from the use of the conjunctive adverb connecting conditional with consequent,or connecting concessive clause with adversative clause.The adverb‘nai’(乃)can be combined with‘wu’(无)to express speculation,which is mostly attested in‘Zuo zhuan’(左传).The use of‘nai’(乃)as restrictive adverb did not appear until the Warring States period,and it comes from the function of affirmative adverb,which is the least frequently used category in classic Chinese.