Diachronic Research On The Evolution Of Chinese Promising Based On The Discourse Corpus Since The Weijin Dynasty

Based on the written material, we analyses the evolution of “promising” by dividinghistorical times into five different periods which last from Wei-jin Southern and Northerndynasties to now. Corpus was excerpted and tabulated from many literary works and researchwas conducted on using distribution, type of constitute, social class and social distance affect thelanguage usage and choice of promising. After comparing and analyzing, we find out the trend ofits evolution of “promising”.According to corpus, we find that from promising classes using situation, adverbs are usedmost frequently, but each time showing instability, from a specific promising word changing, thedifferent types of words increased to varying degrees with the development of the times,double-syllable words in different categories trend to be more obvious. From social power to see,the same classes of human prefer to choose promising. From social distance perspective,acquaintance is more likely to use promising, strangers don’t like to use it.The significance of this study is to further enrich the research perspective of “promising”.And also it expands applied research of diachronic pragmatics in Chinese and study of Chineseontology speech acts.