A Diachronic Corpus-Based Study On The Evolution Of The Delexical Verb Jinxing

As a widely used linguistic phenomenon,delexical verbs are frequently used in modern Chinese,but they are limited in number.The common ones are“进行”(jinxing),“加以”(jiayi),“给予”(jiyu),and“予以”(yuyi).Research on the causes for the evolution of delexical verbs based on diachronic comparable corpus can help researchers to deeply understand the special language phenomenon,and it also has very important reference value for teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Based on the Corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics(CCL)and the Diachronic English-Chinese Parallel Corpus(DECPC),this paper uses a combination of quantitative research and qualitative research to analyze the evolutionary features of jinxing,one of the most typical member of delexical verbs.The purpose is to explore the internal and external motivations that cause the evolution of delexical verbs.The main findings are as follows: Firstly,regarding the frequency of jinxing,the same distribution has been found in the original Chinese texts and the translated Chinese texts,both showing a diachronic growth trend,and the frequency has increased sharply in the modern and contemporary period.Secondly,regarding semantic features of jinxing,the meaning of jinxing has evolved from concrete meaning of “move forward” to abstract meaning of “engage in”,but the abstract meaning is not completely replaced by the concrete meaning,which shows that jinxing has experienced a delexicalization process,but not completely delexicalized.The semantic aspect of the object of jinxing is becoming more and more diversified,and the semantic aspect of “activity” is dominant,forming a typical collocation of jinxing construction,while the semantic aspect of “accomplishment” and “state” are not widely used,which belong to the atypical collocation of jinxing construction.Thirdly,syntactically speaking,the delexical verb jinxing has a strong ability of syntactic functions.When jinxing is used as transitive verb,the frequency of jinxing collocating with a noun or a predicate-object structure as its object is obviously decreased,while the frequency of jinxing collocating with intermediate objects and verb objects is significantly increased,forming a typical use of jinxing construction.In addition,jinxing can also be used as an intransitive verb,but used very infrequently.The transitive and intransitive use of jinxing are semantically identical and the two can be converted to each other to a certain extent.The intransitive use of jinxing can be regarded as an atypical use of jinxing.Based on the above findings,a further analysis of the causes underlying the delexicalization of jinxing is made in this study in terms of internal and external language factors.On the one hand,the evolution of jinxing is determined by the internal factors of language.Thehigh-frequency use of jinxing and the disyllabification of jin and xing promote the evolution of jinxing to a delexical verb.On the other hand,external language contact,especially translation,accelerates the delexicalization of jinxing,and the structural forms are increasingly diversified.The changes are not necessarily manifested by new expressions directly input by translation,but are inseparable from the influence of translation.