Morphological Development In Modern Chinese:an Investigation Of The Grammaticalization Of De(的),Di(地),Hua(化),and Xing(性)

Affixation as a new mode of word-formation is becoming increasingly noticeable in modern Chinese and continues to draw more attention in the study of Chinese morphology (Ren1981, Shen1986, Ma1995, Tang2001). Meanwhile it is especially hard to identify suffixes in Chinese due to the nature of characters being equidimensional in form and ideographic by origin. Chinese native-speakers are still likely to look upon each characters as independent words in spite of the fact that modern Chinese has become largely polysyllabic (De Francis1950, Zhou1961, Lu1963, Chen1999). The differentiation between free and bound morphemes, as well as word segmentation, remains unsolved questions in Chinese linguistic studies.Four characters whose suffixal status is particularly remarkable are among those which frequently occur in translation equivalents for English words in contemporary bilingual English-Chinese dictionaries. They are:de (的) for all kinds of English adjectival suffixes, di (地) for the adverbial suffix "-ly", hua (化) for verbal suffixes "-ize","-fy", etc, and xing (性) for nominal suffixes "-ity","-ness", etc. But only hua and xing are acknowledged in monolingual Chinese dictionaries as newly established suffixes in modern Chinese. Both de and di are generally treated as particles used in "de/di constructions" in mainstream Chinese grammars.This thesis investigates the grammatical status of the four characters, to find out whether or not they may all have grammaticalized into bound suffix morphemes, just as the equivalence-building in English-Chinese dictionaries suggests. It adopts the approach of emergent grammar, i.e. viewing morphological development in Chinese as an ongoing process. As de and di are grammatical units that developed out of characters with lexical meanings, it can be said that they have already undergone primary grammaticalization from "full characters" into "empty characters"(Heine et al1991). So this research focuses on whether they are undergoing further secondary grammaticalization (Traugott2002) from syntactic into morphological units, i.e. suffixes and examines the particular contexts or constructions (Bisang2010) in which this occurs.Two types of secondary source are used:1) landmark bilingual English/Chinese dictionaries (1822-2003) are examined for the growing use and identification of de, di, hua and xing as suffixes;2) Chinese grammars and other grammatical literature (1898-2008) are reviewed for the development of affix studies by Chinese linguists, with particular attention paid to the discussion of de, di, hua and xing. Then two types of empirical sources are used to provide evidence of the developing grammaticalization of de, di, hua and xing:1) a contemporary monolingual Chinese corpus (CCL) is used to collect data of the relevant actual usages of the four characters from published newspapers and fiction;2) a psycholinguistic survey is conducted among young educated Chinese native-speakers to test their ability to identify suffixes in Chinese, and their perceptions of the grammatical nature of de and di in the context of particular words and sentences, when written in Chinese characters and in a Romanized script.The corpus data confirm that hua and xing have both developed roles as derivational suffixes in the last three decades, especially in newspaper prose, hua as a suffix for deriving verbs from adjectives and nouns, and xing for deriving abstract nouns from verbs, adjectives, and occasionally nouns. Their roles in deriving new complex words out of pre-existing lexical items are very clear, and they are increasingly productive in official newspaper writing. The psycholinguistic data confirm that young educated Chinese identify these suffixes readily. The corpus findings for de and di as suffixes are multifaceted, suggesting that their use correlates to some extent with the different classes of Chinese adjectives (monosyllabic, disyllabic, reduplicative) to which they are attached. The evolution of de and di as suffixes relies on reanalysis of the linguistic constructions in which they occur, where they take on morphological rather than syntactic significance, and thus grammaticalize into adjectival and adverbial suffixes respectively. For di, this secondary grammaticalization is quite clear, since it is productive in forming new adverbs out of adjectives; and the psycholinguistic evidence shows that it is well recognized as a derivational suffix. For de, the role of adjectival suffix is less clear-cut, because it coincides with a set of homonymous morphemes, and its perception is evidently more variable in the perceptions of young educated Chinese-speakers. This finding is however entirely consistent with the perspective of emergent grammar, and with the ongoing morphological development of de as a suffix in modern Chinese. The intercomparisons between the four suffixes highlight their different evolutionary stages in the emergent grammar of the language, and the Romanization test in the psycholinguistic survey also reveals a higher perception of the suffixal status of Romanized characters.