The Autonomy Of Language And The Role Of Grammaticalization With A Case Study Of Chinese De

Grammaticalzation has emerged very early. With regard to the nature of grammaticalzation, the cognitive school and the generative school are strongly opposed to each other. The former assumes that morphology, syntax, and discourse forms a continuum, and tries to maintain unidirectionality of grammaticalization especially semantic unidirectionality even though the structural unidirectionality may be violated. And so language is functionally driven. On the contrary, generative school maintains that grammaticalization functions in the lexicon level.Grammaticalization is the creation of new functional material of language which involves some sort of categorical reanalysis of lexical or functional material. Taking semantic unidirectionality of grammaticalization as its starting point, this thesis argues against Ziegeler and Traugott's viewpoints on semantic unidirectionality. It is found that semantic level is not reliable. There is no existence of grammaticalization cline and for semantic extension there is no regular rule to follow. Based on the principle of structure dependency (discreteness, hierarchy and recursiveness) and relevant classic logic, this thesis tries to justify that the change of words is determined by the syntactic structure. Meaning of the words changed according to the syntactic structure. The words changed through the process of semantic bleaching, re-colored and then entrenched to be a new stable lexeme. Although there are may be some similarities among different lexemes, this relation can be taken as motivation relations.The development of human language is a continuous procedure. The grammaticalizaition studies mainly contribute to the development of historical linguistics which involves keeping records of language change. If we only focus on the dynamic forms of language while neglect the static structure system of language, the study of grammaticalization would be misleading. If we only focus on the external motivations of meaning understanding and meaning extension while ignore the language structure, there would be nothing exists for semantics to stick on.