The Diachronic Study Of Chinese Adversative Catetory

In recent years, the study of category has become one of the hottest issues in the study of Chinese grammar. Adversative category is a semantic-related category, attaching more attention to the adverbs which has the function of adversative correlative, adversative conjunction and adversative clause. However, we have not seen a whole research work from the perspective of semantic category. Considering the research station above, this article attempts to study the relative markers in adversative clauses from the diachronic perspective, then under the guidance of the prototype theory, the paper sets up a rich adversative category system according to the characters of their semantic sourceThe paper consists of nine chapters.The first chapter is the introduction on the adversative category, which contains the adversative contents, research significance, research situation, unsolved problems, research scopes and research methods, etc.The second chapter describes the main adversative markers respectively during the ancient, medieval and modern Chinese history, then explains the formation, development and replacement of the adversative markers in the long Chinese history, which makes a base for the later research.The third chapter to the seventh chapter discuss the sources of the adversative category, basing on the semantic characters and different divisions of the sources in adversative category, then discuss the formatted time, process, motive and mechanism in the transformation from the source category to the adversative category.The third chapter discusses the adversative category which comes from space category. Space category is the prototype of the adversative category, which can be divided into three types in Chinese language:start-end return, up-down flip, looking back. This chapter mainly studies the transformation from space adversative category to related adversative category in the history of Chinese, such as fanl(返),zhuan(转),fan2(反),dao(倒),gu(顾),etc. It focuses on the evolution, motive and mechanism in their category transformation.It also contains the grammarlization of some individual members.The forth chapter discusses the adversative category which comes from psychological category. The different semantics of the two related sentences could make an adversative meaning, like negative structures and WH-words. In Chinese history, some WH-words can be used to denote an adversative meaning, like shu(孰),shei(谁),zen(怎),na(那(哪)),qi(岂),etc.Also some psychological verbs could compound with negation words and be used as adversative conjunctions. This chapter studies the evolution process of these two types above, such as,buliao(不料),butu(不图),buxiang(不想),sheizhidao(谁知道),zenxiang(怎想),naxiaode(那(哪)晓得),etc. It then summarizes their generality in their evolution, and explains the relationship between the psychological behavior category and the adversative category.The fifth chapter discusses the adversative category which comes from limited category. Firstly, it discusses the adversative connective function of some limited adverbs, which shows the close intimate relationship between these two categories, then discusses the semantic transformation of dan(但),zhishi(只是),buguo(不过),and jiushi(就是),which are all from the limited category to adversative category. Lastly, it investigates the formatted time, process and evolution motivation, mechanism in different categories.The sixth chapter discusses the adversative category which comes from subjective confirm category. It mainly takes qishi(其实)as an example to discuss the evolution process and the causes of its adversative connective functionThe seventh Chapter discusses the adversative category which comes from the Progressive Conjunction. Such as ran(然)and bian(便).Many Pogressive Conjunctions have the adversative function, which reveals that they have a very close relationship.The eighth Chapter is the cross-linguistical investigation of adversative category. Comparation of the conjunction words in Chinese with other languages of the world could reveal the similar evolution paths in the adversative marks, making an evidence to the points of this paper.The ninth Chapter is the epilogue section, summarizing the related evolution path, motivation and mechanism of adversative category. It also discusses about the innovation and the remained research of the paper.