Semantic Exploration Of The Adverb "Jiu"

In Mandarin, the word"jiu"has four parts of speech: verb, preposition, adverb and conjunction. In view of the controversial study on the categorization of the meanings of the adverb'jiu', the thesis tries to find out the core meaning of the adverb"jiu", then explores the syntactic and pragmatic characteristics which are restricted by the core meaning of the adverb"jiu", and finally makes suggestions on the semantic compartmentalization of the adverb"jiu".First, under the direction of the modern cognitive grammatical theory, the thesis analyzes the metaphorical cognitive working mechanism of the semantic evolvement of"jiu"thoroughly to explore the inherent cognitive motivity that runs through the whole process of the semantic evolvement of the adverb"jiu". Second, the thesis describes the diachronic grammaticalization process in terms of grammaticalization theory, and explores the rules of the advent and the evolvement of the adverb"jiu", aiming at making the description of the format validate to the explanation of the meaning. Third, after having found the core meaning of the adverb"jiu", the thesis makes syntactic and pragmatic analysis on the adverb"jiu". Finally, the thesis makes suggestions on the semantic compartmentalization of the adverb"jiu". And a key goal through out the paper is the exploration of the semantic function and the discussion on the semantic categorizations of"jiu".The adverb"jiu"is always the very difficult point in Chinese teaching. The author hopes this thesis may give some useful hint on the teaching of"jiu"and make some contributions to the research of the adverb"jiu".