On The Grammaticalization Of "Qi"

Cannot serve as syntactic constituents alone, function words are adhered to or connect various types of notional words in grammar. According to the relationships with notional words or phrases, function words can be divided into six kinds of adverb, conjunction, preposition, interjection, onomatopoeia and auxiliary word. As an analytic language, Chinese has no morphological changes in strict sense. Therefore, function words act as morphological changes in Chinese, which has great impacts on semantics. In teaching of Chinese as a second language, function word teaching is important and difficult. Most of the function words came from the grammaticalization of notional words. Having real meanings at the beginning, they finally became the present function words as a result of a complex progress. What kind of process did they go through on earth? Taking the word " and " as an example, this paper introduced the grammaticalization process of function words.Based on previous research data, this paper collected a large amount of linguistic data and discussed the grammaticalization process of YU based on the theoretical knowledge of linguistics. This paper is divided into six parts.The first part is the introduction. Combining with a lot of ideas and writings of scholars at home and abroad, it summarized the theories of grammaticalization and the research status of the grammaticalization of YU and clarified the origin and significance of this topic.The second part is the theories of grammaticalization. In order to figure out the grammaticalization of function words, we should have a general understanding of relevant theories of grammaticalization at first. Combining the existing research results, this part explained what grammaticalization is from both narrow and broad senses. Then it presented some views on the motivation, mechanisms and laws of grammaticalization.The third part is the grammaticalization of YU. In modern Chinese, YU is a function word with no real meanings. But at the beginning, it is a notional word with rich contents and multiple meanings. It not only can be used as noun, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, but also can analyze its various meanings of serving as noun and verb in details. Then, combining a large number of linguistic data, it studied YU serving as prepositions and conjunctions in various periods and explained the root reasons of its grammaticalization. It is the core part of this paper.The fourth part is case study. It analyzed the motivation, mechanisms and laws of grammaticalization of YU. Combining linguistic data, it analyzed the motivation and mechanism the grammaticalization of YU in detail from four aspects of re-analysis, syntactic environment, semantic overgeneralization and pragmatic frequency.The fifth part is the conclusion. It systematically summarized the whole paper and concluded a general summary.