The Contrastive Grammaticalization Study On The Chinese Character "用" And The English Word "Use"

With the rapid development of economy and the going-out strategy of China,the number of contrastive studies between Chinese language and English language is increasing.The results of contrastive study between Chinese language and English language become more diversified."Yong",occupying important position in people’s daily life,is one of common characters.Generally speaking,the meaning of "yong’ is nearly equivalent to "use"in practical teaching and translating aspects,while the difference in properties and meanings of "yong" and "use" may cause some unequivalences on translation and teaching.The thesis based on the two corpora combines descriptive research with explanatory research from synchronic and diachronic perspective.The thesis deals with data with quantitative and qualitative method together to study the following questions:(1)What are the differences of "yong" and "use" in the process of grammaticalization?(2)What are different features of "gong" and "use" in the process of grammaticalization?The findings of the study are as follows:In the first place,there are many differences in grammaticalization of "yong"and "use".The degree of grammaticalization of "yong" is higher than that of "use",for "yong" can be used as a preposition,and play a functional role in sentence structure,while "use" is still used as a lexical word.There are also some overlappings in the development of "gong",for "yong" can be used not only as a verb,but also a preposition,whereas the English word "use" just forms some fixed matches and fixed verb structures.The degree of the grammaticalization of "use"contrasting to "yong" is lower than that of "yong".In terms of the path grammaticalization,"yong" has one path to grammaticalize from the verb;while"use" has two paths to grammaticalize,one from the verb and the other from the noun.In the second place,there are dierent features between "yong" and "use" in the process of grammaticalization."Yong" shows the features of gradualuty,abstraction,unidirectionality,perisistence,etc,while "use" presents abstraction,subjectification,and persistence.In the grammaticalization process of "use",the graduality feature is not obvious,while subjectification feature of "use" is very clear.However,"yong"tend to express its features of abstraction and persistence.In a word,this thesis makes a contrastive study on "yong" and "use" from the perspective of grammaticalization.It is expected that the results from this study can help the development of the hypothesis of typology and enrich the study of contrastive linguistics.