A Study On The Grammaticalization Of Chinese Verb “Da”

The Chinese verb “Da” is a special polysemous word with the greatest meaning and the most comprehensive usage. And the research of Chinese character “Da” has a long history. For traditional studies, some scholars only work out the citation collection of it, some take it as a prefix of verb, and some regard it as a generalized verb, etc. However, for current studies, more and more scholars realized that the traditional way is inadequate to explain the underlying mechanisms of its changes both in meaning and form. So they begin to study “Da” from the new cognitive perspective, which based on various cognitive theories, such as prototype theory, image schema, metaphor and metonymy theory, semantic network, grammaticalization theory, etc.However, there are still seldom researches about the grammaticalization of “Da”, let alone the authoritative or detailed ones. In order to give an elaborate explanation of synchronic change at diachronic level, this thesis studies on its evolutionary process of grammaticalization, mainly from two aspects: the semantic change of “Da” and the lexical-syntactic change of “Da”. Among various grammatical mechanisms proposed by different scholars, this thesis sorts out four major mechanisms to analyze the grammaticalization of “Da”: reanalysis and analogy to explain its lexical-syntactic changing, while metaphor and metonymy to explain its semantic bleaching.Compared with different wordbooks, we first sum up the numerous senses of “Da” mainly from The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary(1983), based on which we lay out the semantic network of “Da”, including its protosense meaning and extended meanings. Metaphor and metonymy are used to explain this process of semantic change. In the meantime, we discuss the lexical-syntactic change of “Da”, which includes three aspects: firstly, undergoing the process of disyllabification, “Da” is used as a prefix, which means adding “Da” to a monosyllabic verb and regarding “Da” as a prefix. And the meaning of the formed two-syllabic word is mainly from the second verb. Secondly, “Da” is used as a verb again after reanalysis. In this case, prefix “Da” becomes a verb and the second verb becomes a noun. Thirdly, “Da” is used as a light verb after analogy, which can be combined with any morpheme: noun object, verb object and adjective object. Finally, to complete the explanation of the whole grammatical process, we carry out and discuss some other special conditions when “Da” used as a preposition, a conjunction, a quantifier or an auxiliary.With the exploration of the grammaticalization process of “Da” from two aspects, this thesis tries to conduct a relative full-round analysis of Chinese verb “Da” with a view to probing into its underlying mechanisms of its evolution. In addition, this thesis intends to show that it’s a good way to clear up the gap between Chinese and English by using foreign language linguistic theories to make a better explanation of Chinese language phenomenon.