The Progressive Aspect Marker Zai In Modern Chinese

Recent years saw many studies in more specific aspects like the tense andaspect constructions with the tide of cognitive linguistics. With this trend, the aspectconstruction, especially the dialect aspect should be paid more attention.This thesis is a tentative study of the progressive aspect marker zai in WuhanDialect, based upon Grammaticalization Theory and Markedness Theory cooperatingwith Aspect Markedness, highlighting our understanding of the aspect marker zaiwhich is a new approach to Chinese aspect marker, especially in dialects. The entirethesis is made up of6chapters. After an overall introduction of the motivation,objective, methodology, data collection and layout of the thesis (1), it deals with theliterature review on previous studies of Wuhan Dialect, the grammaticalizationprocess of zai and zai in dialects to find the gaps between previous studies and thepresent one (2). In order to solve problems remaining on the study of zai, this thesisadopts the Grammaticalization Theory (3.1) to reveal the origin of the aspect markerzai in Wuhan Dialect (4) and illustrates the distribution of zai to find out there arethree progressive aspect markers in Wuhan Dialect (5) via the Aspect Markednessand Pragmatic Markedness Hypothesis (3.2). Also, focusing on the two specialaspect marker zai4and zai5, the thesis elucidates the differences of the two inmorphology, aspect values and pragmatic functions (5).Based on meticulous analysis, three important points could be derived:1. Zai holds the use as verb (zai1) and prep (zai2) since it came into use as earlyas in the oracle inscription (4.2-4.4). Up till the Eastern Han Dynasty, the position ofprep zai2went through a big change to the post-predicate position (4.5), and itdisplaced to the sentence final position in Song Dynasty. Following thegrammaticalization process, the sentence final adv zai4came into being at the sametime (4.6) and was widely used in Modern Chinese with few instances showed up inTang Dynasty (4.7). Hence it is biased to say zai4is derived from zai3. With the investigation, this thesis holds that in Wuhan Dialect, zai4comes into being earlierthan zai3and both of them are advs which can be the progressive aspect markers.2. After a detailed analysis on the distribution and uses of the different types ofzai in Wuhan Dialect, this thesis focuses on a comparison study of zai4and zai5in thepurpose of finding out zai5is not only a copy of zai3or equals to zai4, but a fixedprogressive aspect marker while zai4sometimes could signal the continuousity. Astransient verbs are only acceptable in the pattern with zai5, zai5is taken for a specialprogressive aspect marker in Wuhan Dialect.3. Cooperating with the markedness value and pragmatic functions, this thesisilluminates the grammatical value of zai5as well as the unique charm of WuhanDialect.