Contrastive Study On Gammaticalization Of Chinese "Gei" (给) And English "Give"

Grammaticalization, as a universal linguistic phenomenon, attracted more and more attention of western and eastern scholars for a long time. This conception was firstly appeared in ancient China as "Xu Hua", but grammaticalization attained its continuous development due to a lot of contributions made by western scholars. According to Hopper & Traugotte(1993), grammaticalization is usually defined as a process whereby lexical items and constructions assume in certain Linguistic contexts grammatical functions, and once grammaticalized, continue to develop more grammatical functions. It is a very important notion in the study related to language changes, and the purpose of this process is to make our conversation more concise, easier and faster. The evolution process of grammaticalization mainly involves four aspects: semantic bleaching, syntactic reanalysis and extension, pragmatic changes and phonetic weakening.This thesis aims not only to describe what individual grammaticalization cases are like, but also to probe the reasons behind the linguistic facts. Moreover, the scope of the studies will be extended from lexical items to phrases, syntactic structures and even discourses. From the perspective of synchronic and diachronic studies, the thesis mainly tend to demonstrate the vital importance of grammaticalization theories for the regularity of language evolution by a contrastive study on different grammaticalization process and degree of Chinese "gei"(ç»™) and English "give", and try to find out the pragmatic factors behind their semantic changes and syntactic evolution. Then, try to explain why Chinese "gei" has gone further than English verb "give" in the diachronic process of grammaticalization even though they have similar original meaning and structures.The whole thesis will be divided into five parts. Chapter one is a general introduction about rationale of the thesis, I am trying to combine cognitive linguistics with sociolinguistics and syntax to support my arguments. In Chapter two, the multi-functions of both "gei" and "give" are the emphases. In addition, I will compare these two verbs to find out their similarities. Chapter three and four are the core of this thesis. The process of their grammaticalization and contrastive study on these two verbs will be clearly analyzed here. Chapter five is the conclusion and implication.Through contrastive study on grammaticalization of "gei" and "give", we can discovery many differences in the characteristics of these two languages which help us master the specific properties of them well and use them more accurately. The final result of the study is supposed to provide certain referential values for the proper usage on these two multi-functional verbs, and for cross-cultural language teaching and Chinese-English (or English-Chinese) translation as well.