Diachronic Study On "N+men" Structure

The main purpose of this paper is to perform a diachronic study on the structure "N+men(们) " , in which we review the derivation of "men" from the diachronic dimension and what has been established in modern and contemporary Chinese. And we depict its evolution by adopting structural grammar and functional grammarticalization theory and by means of such methods as stratificational analysis, transformational analysis, semantic feature analysis, semantic orientation, and so on.In this paper, "men" is divided into three types: A. prominal morpheme+men; B. nominal morpheme+men; C. single noun/NP+men. And we mainly review the grammarticalization of type B, and changes of the nouns' subcategories and the evolution of syntactical distribution, grammatical meaning and pragmatic meaning in/of type C construction.This paper is composed of five chapters.Chapter 1 is the preface, in which we deal with these topics: (1) To define the object of this study and make clear the corpus. (2) To summarize some points relating to this study, such as studies on subcategories of nouns in "N+men" , grammatical and pragmatical meaning of "men" , etc. (3) To make clear property of men. (4) To explain the value of this study and so on.Chapter 2 deals with the birth of men and the evolution of "N+men" construction. In this chapter, we talk about these issues: (1) Birth and derivation of men, variants when "-men" came into being, the reasons of repeating interchange between "-men" and "-mei(每)" . (2) Development and the up-and-down usage frequencies of "N. +men" , so that to outline its main evolution route.Chapter 3 talks about the evolution of "N+men" , namely how type B construction came into being. Topics talked about in this part include: (1) the form, semantic item and their relations of the four group of words in type B "N+men" in modern Chinese; (2) the evolution process of these words from "N+men" construction. We find that type B construction underwent three stages in the rough: a) normal "N+men" expressing "MORE THAN ONE" , lasting from early 11^th century to late 17^th century; b) differentiation of forms, syntagmatic (compositional) rules, grammatical/ pragmatical meanings, from early 18^th century to late 19^th century; c) completion of lexicalization, from early 20^th century to present.Chapter 4 discusses the evolution of "N+men" after the previous chapter, namely the development of type C construction. Issues discussed here include: (1) Changes of subcategories of noun in type C construction. First, from the point of view of measure unit, we divided "N" in type C construction into two groups: (A) NP; (B) Single noun. Then, we probe into its diachronic evolution in the light of classification of "W+men" in modern Chinese. (2) Distribution at syntactic positions of "N+men" construction by statistics. (3) Definition of grammatical meaning of "N+men" in comparison of plural number in English. (4) Pragmatic meaning of "N+men" .And the last part, chapter 5, is the epilogue.