Diachronic And Synchronic Study On The Chinese Word “De”

The Chinese word “De”, one of the key words of Chinese vocabulary research, is of high frequency in the ancient and modern Chinese literatures. Only being used as a verb in ancient Chinese, “De” has slowly grown into a word with rich, flexible, and lively uses in several thousands years of Chinese history. With time elapsing, some uses now only can be seen in the ancient literatures while some are still used today. This paper, from a historical perspective, explores the reasons and rules of the word “De” that has generated diverse uses in modern Chinese. Meanwhile, we also analyze its syntactic function and the difference between its semantic and pragmatic function from the aspect of synchronic to study the modern Chinese word “De” comprehensively and thoroughly.This paper is mainly divided into the following several parts:The preface mainly introduces the research contents, the research methods as well as the explanation of symbols in this paper.The first part: we classify the Chinese word “De” from these typical sentences in modern Chinese literatures so that the research direction is focused.The second part: we collect and arranged many current studies of the modern Chinese word “De”. This work will help us understand the present research status about this word so that we can do further study on the basis of the predecessors.The third part: Combining with the relative theory of grammaticalization, from the historical perspective, we discuss the grammatical progress of the Chinese word “De”. Meanwhile, we compare their different uses and features from the aspect of synchronic. Using descriptive and explanatory approach, we explore in great depth on different uses of the Chinese word “De”.The fourth part: “De”, a sign of verb-complement structure, is widely used in modern Chinese. We discuss this kind of structure about its development process and syntactic function in order to obtain a profound understanding about the sentences with the word “De”.