A Cognitive Study Of The Grammaticalization Of �QI� In Wenzhou Dialect

There has been much research on grammaticalization,yet it is still popular in linguistic research.There is less research on the process of grammaticalization.Wenzhou Dialect is such an example.Wenzhou Dialect is said to be the living fossil of the Middle Chinese language.In Wenzhou Dialect,�Qi� is much used,and is of different parts of speech,double tones and various lexical meanings.Its segmentations of meaning are abundant.In addition,in the modern Chinese language and the other dialects,�Qi� and �Qilai� are often taken as the trend category to explore their semantic meanings and processes of grammaticalization.There is not much research on Wenzhou Dialect,while the research on �Qi� is much less.Most of the research is conducted in the methods of traditional linguistics from the perspectives of semantics,grammar or syntax.This thesis aims at researching the grammaticalization of �Qi� in Wenzhou Dialect with the emphasis on the mechanisms in the process of grammaticalization from the cognitive perspective.Based on the previous research,�Qi� is divided into eight segmentations of meaning,and the paths of grammaticalization of �Qi� are inferred and reconstructed,namely,�Qi1� ?�Qi2�? �Qi3�? �Qi4�? �Qi5�,�Qi1�? �Qi2�? �Qi3�? �Qi6� ? �Qi7�,and �Qi6� ? �Qi8�.In this thesis,the roles that the cognitive mechanisms such as subjectification,metaphor,metonymy and prominence play in the process of grammaticalization of �Qi� are studied.Subjectification enables �Qi� to gradually lose objectivity and to increase subjectivity.In the process of being mapped from the concrete cognitive domains into the abstract ones,metaphor plays an important part.The mechanism of metonymy,especially the stand-for relation of + PART FOR WHOLE+,promotes the whole semantic unit to be substituted with a certain semantic component and helps the new segmentations of meaning come into being.Prominence,on the one hand,enables new segmentations of meaning to produce thanks to the semantic component being prominent.On the other hand,owing to the prominence of the other parts of the related constructions,some segmentations of meaning of �Qi� which are without prominence take shape.Those cognitive mechanisms have a combined action in every period of the grammaticalization of �Qi�.Moreover,the thesis is combined with the trajector/landmark alignment to differentiate the meaning of each segmentation of meaning and to clarify the relevance among them,in order to elaborate on the grammaticalization and the semantic and pragmatic changes of �Qi�.The coexistence of the various segmentations of meaning reflects that �Qi� has not fully grammaticalized.Nevertheless,among those segmentations of meaning,�Qi5� and �Qi8� has been function words through grammaticalization.Analyzing the operations of the cognitive mechanisms of the process of grammaticalization does good to differentiate each segmentation of meaning of �Qi� and to make the grammatical functions explicit.