A Study On The Evolution Of Chinese Hypothetical Concessive Conjunctions

In this paper,we firstly integrated the changes of Chinese hypothetical concessive conjunctions from ancient times until today,and sorted out 18 typical Chinese hypothetical concessive conjunctions.And then,we studied the grammar evolution of Chinese hypothetical concessive conjunctions around the 18 words from two aspects.On the one hand,we generally explored the evolution processes of the words;on the other hand,we integrated the conditions and mechanisms of their grammar evolutions in detail.From the study,we founded out the syntactic condition is the basis and premise of the grammaticalization,the semantic characteristic determines the general direction of the grammaticalization,the pragmatic environment confirms the new grammatical meanings and functions of the grammaticalizing words.Metaphorical mapping,cognitive reasoning,reanalysing and subjective changing are the main cognitive mechanisms of the grammaticalization.Finally,we concluded some rules of the evolution of Chinese hypothetical concessive conjunctions.For the one-syllable words,there are two evolution source,one is adverb,the other is verb.For the two-syllable words,there are also two evolution sources,one is compounded by two morphemes,this can be divided into two kinds: 1)the two morphemes are synonymous;2)one morpheme is the root morpheme,and the other is an affix.The other evolution source of the two-syllable words is the exicalization,this can be divided into four kinds: 1)phrases;2)syntactic structures;3)across-layer structures;4)combined structures.And for the conditions and mechanisms of the evolution of Chinese hypothetical concessive conjunctions,the internal factors of language are the internal conditions and basis,people's cognitive inference activities are the direct motivations and mechanisms.