Study Of Lexicalization And Grammaticalization Of "Xshuo"

The formation of modern Chinese vocabulary has gone through a long process, developing from the basic words which were formed as early as in Qin and Han dynasties and transmitted from generation to generation. Therefore, it is necessary to study the generation and development process of the basic words.The "shuo" verbs is one group of the basic and important verbs in Chinese, which has also undergone great changes in the development process of ancient Chinese to modern Chinese. Many scholars have done researches on one or some "shuo" verbs from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and achieved a lot. However, there is little attention paid to the lexicalization of "Xshuo". Only several articles specially discussed this phenomenon.This thesis focuses on a systematic study of the lexicalization of "Xshuo" in Chinese. For the length limits, we only select "bieshuo", "woshuo" and "ruguoshuo" in Chinese as example to research, not only presenting a comprehensive description of their properties and their developing path, but also offering an explanation of the mechanisms and motivations of their development. It is not just a simple description of their existence in modern Chinese, but also tries to find their development progress and motivations behind the language change.Theoretically, this thesis is based on the theory of grammaticalization (including lexicalization), cognitive pragmatics and subjectification. Methodologically, we unite a synchronic study with a diachronic one in this thesis in order to describe the present properties of "Xshuo" and explain their development path and cause.This study combines the phenomenon of grammaticalization with lexicalization, and the results show that these two are not opposite, but related to each other in many situations.In Chinese, some of "Xshuo" have gone lexicalization at an earlier time and some are undergoing lexicalization, therefore, to study this phenomenon timely and to reveal the nature and mechanisms of its evolution is very useful for observation of language variation and investigation of language evolution theory. This paper tries to find the own personality and rules of Chinese lexical system, which has great significance on enriching Chinese lexical theory. We also believe that this study has some practical significance, namely, it is helpful for compiling various types of Chinese dictionaries and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.