The Study On Yu???and X_Monosyllabic Yu???Form The Perspective Of Chinese Change

Chinese has been lasting for more than 3000 years,which has been proved to be the best sample for observing superficial linguistic features of language changes,demonstrating procedures of language changes and exploring causes and mechanisms of language changes.In those elements of Chinese,prepositions,as a closed set in numbers and the importance in syntax as well as high frequency in usage,is one of the most important window to observe language changes.This dissertation investigates the historic change of Chinese spatial preposition "yu(?),as a fossil case from the aspect of "functional-cognitive" linguistics.It focuses on both the origination and the flow of '"yu(?)",but the key lies in the changing situations how "yu(?)�changed among lexical and syntactic categories as the time went by.In terms of the investigation,this dissertation also discusses the sources and the formations of several disyllable functional words involving "yu(?)��The dissertation contains five chapters.Chapter I is the introduction.It briefly introduces the origin,the value and the significance of the research,and outlines the key issues of this dissertation on the basis of summarizing related literatures both abroad and home.At the same time,this chapter also briefly explains the data resources and some wording of statements related to the situation.Chapter 2 is the diachronic and synchronic investigation in t"yu(?)�.In synchronic study,it firstly investigates the use frequency of "yu(?),in the preposition system in terms of large scale corpus.Then,it exams the syntactic representation of''yu(?)" in moderm Chinese from the aspect of the flow.Finally,it describes the semantics of "yu(?)" from the view of origination.In diachronic study,this chapter investigates the changing situations of "yu(?)" in different historic periods.Chapter 3 is about the degree of lexicalization of "yu(?)".There are two sections:the first section reviews the researches on how to determine a language unit is a word in Chinese,the second section investigates the degree of lexicalization of various structures of "Xn,onosyllabic Yu(g?)" in moderm Chinese by voting of language intuition on the experimental platform of E-Primal.Chapter 4 is the case study of changes of several "X,onosyllabicYu(?)�.It investigates the evolution processes of "yu(?)�in the structure�X yu(?)�into adverbs in "guo yu(??)and"zhong yu(??)"and into conjunctions in "jian yu(??)" and prepositions in�you yu(??)�from the diachronic aspect.It also discusses the time of formation,the procedure,the mechanism and the causes of "yu(?)�changing into a preposition as in "zhi yu(??)" in details.Chapter 5 is the conclusion.It summarizes the research of the whole dissertation and points out the limitations of the researching.It also re-examines the research on language changes in terms of the problems in the dissertation,and finally it looks forward to future research about this subject.The main innovative points of this dissertation are as follows:1)Existing researches on grammaticalization and lexicalization focus on a certain case how to get the grammatical and lexical categories in historic changes,attentions are hardly paid to how to get primary categories and keep stable categories and how to get further change,thus,this dissertation focuses on both originations and flows,especially stresses on the aspect of flows.2)The dissertation initially observes different degrees of lexicalization of word groups with similar language elements in Chinese under the"E-Prime" platform and discovers the threshold value of voting of language intuition whose p value is 0.75.4)The relationship between grammaticalization and lexicalization is a hot topics in recent discussions,the conclusions of those discussions should have been examined in different languages.This research on historic revolutions of several classical "Xmonosyllabic Yu(?)�disyllabic words will explore further procedures of certain Chinese lexicalization cases and provide Chinese instances for understanding the relationship between grammaticalization and lexicalization.Historic examinations on several disyllabic words containing "yu(?)"indicate the time that the cases became the typical words are different and the causes are different too,thus changes are independent.Such tabs as�further grammaticalization of prepositions�,�preposition incorporation�and�lexicalization�used to explain language changes are limited.5)Language usage is the dynamic power for pushing�yu(?)to change.In the procedure of Chinese change,"yu(?)" lost the combination capability with motion verbs,that's to say "yu(?)" lost its function in expressing motion events,which leaded to the degrading in syntactic status and values,but in moderm Chinese it is only the Vmonosyllabic with the strong combination with objects allows it occupy a syntactic position.Besides,in Ming dynasty and Qing dynasty,the styles changes motivated the development of novels and brought in the sharp increasing in written texts,which provided the possibility for narrative utterances and longer phrases entering the written text,all those external factors activated the formation process for "jianyu(??)"and "you yu(??)"as both a preposition and a conjunction.