Study On Syntactic Conditions And Grammaticalization Of "X Yilai, Y"

On phrase yilai, the former scholars mainly focused on the usages of yilai itself. Through the combined methods of the semantic and syntactic, the synchronic and diachronic, this paper expands our views on yilai, depicting syntactic conditions and grammatical process of "X yilai, Y".1) According to time character and grammatical function, we illuminate X components and discuss the syntactic and semantic characteristics of "X yilai".2) According to different semantic characters of Y, we find three kinds of Y: Y₁ that is durative, Y₂ that has an emphasis and Y₃ that expresses changes.3) In the diachronie development of yilai, the yilai structure has two changes: one is that the preposition zi gradually fell off through the long process of reanalysis, because of the need of linguistic economy and clarity; the other is because the analogy impelled, X function gradually expanded to verbs, period time phrases, adjectives, distinctive words and adverbs which were the combined objects one by one in the proper semantic conditions and syntactic surroundings.4) Yilai semantic changes have three main stages: time words of open period, coexistence of open-period and close-period words, time words of close period. It has three reasons for the changes: the generalized implication evolved into a conventional implication in pragmatics; the evolutive meaning of lai pointed to speakers in cognitive linguistics; the increasing frequency of yihou led to the exit of yilai from the meaning of alter a time point.