A Study Of Diachronic Evolution Of English Conditionals And Chinese Conditionals

Conditionals play an important role both in English and Chinese languages. They are fully studied by a lot of linguists from the perspective of traditional grammar, structural grammar, generative grammar and cognitive grammar, including the analytic investigation or contrastive study on their definition, classification, generation, prototype and so on. But there are few contrastive studies of the diachronic evolution process of English conditionals and Chinese conditionals. This thesis has made a contrastive study between the diachronic evolution of English conditionals and Chinese conditionals, including an explanation of their mechanisms and cognitive motivations.This thesis has been involved in studying dominating marked conditionals, which are if-conditionals in English and ru guo-conditionals in Chinese. Guided by the theory of grammaticalization, based on corpus of different historical periods from Old English and Old Chinese period to Modern English and Modern Chinese period, the thesis has described the diachronic evolution process of English if-conditionals and that of Chinese ru guo-conditionals. The result of the discussion reveals the following facts:(1) English if-conditionals evolved from gyf/gif-conditionals. This process is primarily motivated by the reanalysis and frequency. Conditionals may be classified into real conditionals and unreal conditionals. The unreal conditionals express the situation which is contrary to the reality so that its structure is different from normal statement. Through diachronic evolution, the unreal conditionals use the past tense to express the present tense and the future tense, and the past perfect tense to express the past tense. This evolution is motivated by analogy and subjectification. At the same time, the semantic of if-conditionals has been extended with frequently use.^-conditionals could also express comparison, interpretation, convention, commentary and so on. The pragmatic function has been extended. (2) The grammaticalization of ru guo-conditionals in Chinese is largely influenced by the semantic changes of character ru guo. ru guo-conditionals come from ruo guo-conditionals. It is not until Song dynasty we begin to use ru guo-conditionals, ruo guo is the foundation of ru guo. Both ruo guo and ru guo go through from "condition conjunctions+modal adverbs" to "condition conjunctions+condition conjunctions". During the diachronic evolution process, analogy and reanalysis are the main motivation or mechanism. The conditional connective ru guo eventually completed the grammaticalisation and lexicalization in Ming dynasty.Based on the investigation above, this thesis has devoted to finding out the similarities and differences between the diachronic evolution process of English if-conditionals and Chinese ru guo-conditionals. They have common cognitive foundation, in other words, both of them are motivated by the conversion of people’s perspectives and focuses when understanding and expressing an event. The diachronic evolution process of English if-conditionals and Chinese ru guo-conditionals are also similar in most of characteristics of diachronic evolution, reanalysis mechanism and analogy mechanism. But beyond that, there is a change of semantic preference found in the diachronic evolution of Chinese ru guo-conditionals, whereas it is not discovered in the evolution of English if-conditionals. Both if and ru guo have semantic extension. The diachronic evolution of English if-conditionals is also different from that of Chinese ru guo-conditionals in path, degree and pattern. These differences may be caused by their differences in the degree of subjectivization, these similarities may be caused by metonymy.The study made in this thesis can enrich the contrastive study of diachronic evolution of sentence pattern in different languages and can be of reference significant to teachers, students and translators in teaching, learning and translating English if-conditionals and Chinese ru guo-conditionals.