Study On The Origin And Evolution Of Chinese Correlative Adverbs

This dissertation mainly investigates the origin of Chinese correlative adverbs and their semantic evolution paths from the perspective of diachronic evolution.Taking relevance as the core,the paper explores its evolution to related categories for furthering study of evolutionary motivations and mechanisms,so as to summarize its evolutionary laws.The full text is divided into six parts.The first chapter is the introduction of research background and objectives,research status and literature review,research content and framework,research methods as well as corpus sources etc.The second chapter mainly discusses the scope of Chinese correlative adverbs,together with the differences between correlative adverbs and conjunctions,and classifies them semantically.The typical correlative adverbs mainly include: You(?),Ye(?),Geng(?),Huan(?),Zai(?),Dao(?),Que(?),Bian(?),Jiu(?)and Cai(?),etc.According to semantics,the correlative adverbs can be divided into three categories.The first category is correlative adverbs that express repetitive meaning,mainly including "Geng(?),Huan(?)),Zai(?),You(?),Fu(?),Yi(?),Ye(?),Que(?)";The second category is correlative adverbs that express transition meaning,mainly including "Dao(?),Que(?),"Gu(?),Fan(?),Fu(?),Zhuan(?),Fan(?),Huan(?)";The third category is correlative adverbs that express consecutive meaning,which mainly include “Ji(?),Bian(?),Jiu(?),Nai(?),Nai(?/?),Ze(?),Sui(?)”,etc.The third chapter mainly explores the origin and evolution of correlative adverbs with repetitive meaning.Words with repetitive meaning can not only directly develop from the meaning of "repetition" to the function of "coordinate" conjunctions,but also can develop from "repetition" to related functions that express hypothetical conditions or concession conditions by the development of “gain”.Some of them have further developed a mature function of progressive conjunction,such as “Geng”(?),and choice conjunction,such as “Huan”(?)?“Fu”(?)and so on.The fourth chapter mainly investigates the origin and evolution of correlative adverbs with adversative meaning.Words with adversative meaning all have developed the function of the relevance function with the meaning of adversative,some of which have continued to develop the function of the relevance function of the meaning of concession through the evolution of emphatic and affirmative adverb,such as “Dao”(?)and “Que”(?),and some have developed the function of adversative conjunctions,such as “Gu”(?).The fifth Chapter mainly discusses the origin and evolution of the consecutive adverbs,all of which have developed the relevance function of the meaning of consecution.Some of them have developed the function with the relevance function of concessive condition through the evolution of emphatic and affirmative adverb,and some have also developed the mark of contrastive narration,such as “Ji”(?)and“Ze”(?).Chapter Six summarizes the paths and laws of semantic evolution of Chinese correlative adverbs.Although the semantic meanings of the above three categories of words are quite different,they all have developed the relevance function based on the key factor that the semantic framework presupposes a previous occurrence or a premise: a repeated action,a counter-anticipated fact or a precondition and reason.It is on the basis of this semantic framework that various functions of relevance have been developed and evolved.In the process of semantic evolution,Chinese correlative adverbs bear the following characteristics: unidirectionality and gradualness,layering and specialization,retention and persistence,frequency and descending of category.