A Diachronic Contrastive Study On Semantic Maps Of English And Chinese Verbs "Give" And "Gei"

English verb "give" and Chinese verb "gei",as the most typical GIVE verbs,have been widely concerned with by linguists at home and abroad.However,majority of their studies focused on the syntactic structures,polysemous meanings and grammaticalization path of the two verbs.Few investigations have ever conducted a typological analysis between the two verbs from the diachronic perspective.In view of this,the present study makes a diachronic contrastive analysis of the evolution paths of both English verb "give" and Chinese verb "gei".With the help of domestic and foreign corpora,this study thoroughly collected data of the two verbs in their Old,Middle and Modern stages.Under the framework of Semantic Map,the semantic developments of the two verbs are constructed to observe their evolutionary similarities and differences.The semantic development of the two verbs are similar in two aspects: 1)both English verb "give" and Chinese verb"gei" develop the meaning "to cause or allow" from the core meaning "to transfer";2)both of them have undergone a grammaticalization path.Two reasons contribute to the similarities: 1)both of their semantic extensions are based on Conceptual Metaphor;2)grammaticalization is widely accepted as a cross-linguistic process in language change.The two verbs are different in four aspects: 1)the original meaning of Chinese verb "gei" is "to supply" rather than "to transfer",while the core meaning of English verb "give" is "to transfer";(2)the grammaticalization degree of "gei" is higher than that of "give";(3)the grammaticalization path of verb "gei" is bidirectional,while that of verb "give" is unidirectional;(4)the meanings extended from verb "give" are richer than those of verb "gei".The underlying motivations are as follows: 1)English semantic extension relies on collocating with various prepositions and adverbs,while Chinese depends on construction collocation and context;2)the grammaticalization of Chinese language is mainly affected by syntactic factors,while that of English language mainly depends on the semantic transfer and extension.A diachronic contrastive study on semantic maps of English and Chinese verbs"give" and "gei" can help language learners to better understand the commonalities and individualities between Chinese and English.It makes contributions to the study of Language Universal.