A Research On The Lexicalization And Relevant Problems Of Disyllabic "Nan X"

This thesis takes disyllabic "Nan X" as the main object. We study the lexicalization process of word "Nanyi & Nanyu" and "Nanguo & Nanshou & Nankan", and talk about the grammaticalization of "Nan", and the characteristic and semantic features of "X" in "Nan X" and how they impact on the lexicalization degree of "Nan X". This paper is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction. Firstly we give the reason why we research in these words. Then we summarize the related current domestic researches on lexicalization, Chinese word family, affixes and quasi-affixes, lexicalization of individual member of "Nan X". Finally, we introduce our research methods and the corpus sources.The second chapter discusses the semantics change and the path of grammaticalization of "Nan". The semantics change of "Nan" is:on one hand it evolves to "find it difficult", and then extends to "fear"; on the other hand, its meaning is "can not" when modifying verbs, and then it refers to "feel not good". The path of grammaticalization of "Nan" is:it develops from the initial adjective "difficult (to do)" to "not easy", then grammaticalizes to refer to "not suitable" or "not good", and then it becomes a lexical formative.The third chapter we take "Nanyi & Nanyu" as examples to study the lexicalization of adverb "Nan X". We think that "Nanyi" comes from the cohesion of adjective "Nan" and preposition "Yi", while "Nanyu" comes from the cohesion of verb "Nan" and preposition "Yu". Their original meanings are not the same, but they all distribute on adverbial position to modify disyllable verb phrase, so their grammaticalization towards to same direction. The initial meaning of "Yu" is more specific than "Yi", thus the grammaticalization of "Yi" takes place earlier than "Tu". So the lexicalization of "Nanyu" takes place later than "Nanyi", which lead to a wider collocational range and higher usage frequency of "Nanyi"The fourth chapter we take "Nanguo & Nanshou & Nankan" as examples to study the lexicalization of adjective "Nan X". In ancient Chinese, these three words have much in common with each other:they all have some relationship with the meaning of "intolerable", they can collocate with nouns, they often act as predicate in terms of syntactic function. The differences between them are:initially "Nanguo" collocates with words that are related to space or time, then it refers to the physical and psychological feelings of human, thus its lexicalization takes place. The original meaning of "Nanshou" is "not easy to accept". In Song Lyrics it is often used in sentences that have extremely melancholy feelings, then it absorbs contextual meaning and means unhappy or sad. As "Shou" means "bear", so in contemporary Chinese "Nanshou" mainly means "uncomfortable". The original meaning of "Nankan" is "unbearable", in Tang and Song Dynasty it mainly accompanies with words that of melancholy feelings and farewell. In Ming and Qing Dynasty it often collocates with subject that refers to people, and means "embarrassing/embarrassed", then used till today. We think that these three words are in parallel grammaticalization, so they are in the same evolution and all lexicalize to adjective, but they have semantic division. In addition, we also study "Nannai" whose lexicalization degree is lower.The fifth chapter is the conclusion and prospect, which is mainly constituted of the summary and theoretical exploration. We summarize the similarities and differences between the lexicalization of these two categories of "Nan X".