A Study Of Grammaticalization And Typology Of English-Chinese Attributive Possession

Attributive possession is one of the linguists’ focuses, especially attributive possession forms. The major Chinese syntactic form is “N₁（possessor） +（的） + N₂（possessed）” while the main English syntactic forms are “N₁（possessor） ’s N₂（possessed）” and “N₂（possessed） of N₁（possessor）”. Scholars mainly discuss the semantics, which is the basic study of attributive possession and the most normal and traditional perspective, including the classification. The study on grammaticalization research is still in its infancy. Chinese studies are mainly about grammaticalization of attributive marker while English studies lack of the view of grammaticalization of attributive possession. In general, the previous studies can be divided into a grammatical dimension and a comparative dimension, but there are also many limitations:i) Overlooking linguistic systematicity; the grammaticalization of any language form will definitely affect the path, motivation and mechanism of grammaticalization but the previous studies do not make systematic research about them.ii) Lacking a typological perspective. There are no exact and clear definitions or types of attributive possession from typological perspective.Therefore, it is necessary to explore the English-Chinese attributive possession from the perspective of grammaticalization and exploring. At the same time, from a view of typology, this thesis discusses similarities and differences of the attributive possession between English and Chinese and that of the attributive possession in world languages in order to find out language universals, which provides a new perspective to the research of the possession category. Firstly, this thesis introduces the grammaticalization of English-Chinese attributive possession, including the path, mechanism and motivation of the English-Chinese attributive possession and then explains and analyzes similarities and individualities of the English-Chinese attributive possession. Finally, this thesis is from aspects of constituent components and word order to explain and analyze English-Chinese attributive possession types and typological characteristics. The major findings of the study are:i) The path or mode of linguistic grammaticalization in world languages has many similarities, such as: demonstrative pronoun > genitive marker. According to the grammaticalization of English and Chinese attributive possession, “ çš„ ” and “’s”, the two attributive possession markers all grammaticalize from the demonstrative pronoun “之” and “his”.ii) Most linguists agree that there is a cline of grammaticality of the following type: content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix. The grammaticalization path of Chinese attributive possession is “content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix（*）”, and that of English attributive possession is “content item > grammatical word > inflectional affix > clitic”. The hypothesis of unidirectionality is an important principle. The grammaticalization path of Chinese attributive possession “的” is an example of the hypothesis of unidirectionality. But that of English attributive possession “’s”--“inflectional affix > clitic” is a countexample of the hypothesis of unidirectionality.iii) Reanalysis and analogy are the most common mechanisms of grammaricalization of English-Chinese attributive possession. The motivation of Chinese attributive possession is subjectivisation and categotization, and that of English attributive possession is language contact and grammatical replication.iv) The orders of Chinese and English attributive possession exist close correlations between the orders of Chinese and English. GN（genitive + noun） is the only and absolutely dominant order in Chinese, whereas GN（genitive + noun） and NG（noun + genitive） patterns coexist in English. GN in SOV word order is the dominant order while NG in SVO word order is the relatively dominant order. So Chinese is regarded as an OV-VO mixed word order type language and English is regarded as SVO word order. GN / NG is acceptable in Chinese / English language.v) The English attributive possession and Chinese attributive possession have similarities and individualities in the Principle of Relator and Iconicity from the perspective of internal constituents and word order. In “N₁ + çš„ + N₂”, “N₁’s N₂” and “N₂ + of + N₁”, the main function of “的”, “’s” and “of” are to express the possessive relationship between the possessor and the possessed, so “的”,“’s” and “of” can also be regarded as relators that connect the possessor and the possessed. Meanwhile, the thesis also finds English and Chinese attributive possession are respectively extension attribute and connotation attribute. It also proves that the structure of extension attribute is more stable than that of connotation attribute.vi) From the perspective of the correlation between English-Chinese attributive possession types and world order and the correlation between English-Chinese attributive possession and case types, it can be concluded that when meeting the English-Chinese absolutive verb, the absoluter disappears and the ergater preposes; when the absoluter exists, the positions of absoluter and the ergater cannot exchange. In Chinese, if the ergative phrase has possessive relationship or whole-part relationship, the ergative phrase can be split and the possessor or the whole can precede the verb. But in English, the case must be assigned to the corresponding structural position because English has the characteristic of synthetic language. The “’s” genitive also stands for subjective, but “of” stands for objective. So it can be concluded that Chinese is a typical ergative-absolutive and subjective-objective mixed language while English is a typical subjective-objective language.This study has made a certain theoretical breakthrough in language typology and linguistics. On the one hand, this study of grammaticalization and typology of English-Chinese attributive possession explains research insufficiency of their path, motivation and mechanism but also enriches the typological achievement, which provides some meaningful inspirations and references to future study in attributive possession across languages. On the other hand, this thesis presents a theoretical framework for the research of individuality and universality of grammaticalization and typology of English-Chinese attributive possession. Moreover, this study has some practical values. The detailed discussion of grammaticalization and typology of English-Chinese attributive possession explains the path, motivation and mechanism of their grammaticalization and types of English-Chinese attributive possession from typological perspective, which is helpful for English teaching and Mandarin Chinese teaching.