A Study On The Grammaticalization Of Noun-quantifier Compound Words

"Noun-quantifier" compound words have attracted more and more attention from the academic world as its particularity.But the results about its inner structure,time of origins and law of development lack of consistence because we have different judgment standards and different research objects.So this paper firstly checked the existing standards,keep the widely agreed and reasonable 4 standards and raised another 2 new ones according to the traits of the typical "noun-quantifier" words.Then selected 24 words from<the Great Chinese Dictionary>on the basis of these standards.Then this paper divides these 24 words into three groups according to their production mechanism,takes a diachronic investigation about them to describe the whole development process.The dates of creation of the words came from cross-layer structure almost are very early,some of them generated in Wei,jin,southern and northern dynasties.The words came from grammaticalization almost generated in later time.Most of the words came from analogize also generated in later time.Then this paper analyses its causes of production which include ?changes in the language system,that is measure words lose its grammatical functions,?phonetic features,that is the influence of rhythm and dimeter features of Chinese,?pragmatic factor,that is the use of the maxim of quantity,?cognitive factor,that is metonymy provides the possibility.And also the laws of development,according to the evolution process,which include high frequency and frequent match rules.Finally,this paper discusses the most controversial problem about"noun-quantifier" which is what its inner structure is according to the conclusions above.It finds out,according to the production process,that the additional form matches most with the features of measure mprpheme.