Diachronic Study On The Kind Of Adverbs "Geng"(更) In Chinese Language

The adverb "geng"(更) is often used as the comparative in modern Chinese, which means " further" , higher in degree. Besides "geng"(更), there are "yu "(愈), "yi "(益), "jia "(加)and "gengjia " (更加),etc. in Chinese language, which are called the kind of adverbs "geng"(更) in this article. Many scholars have studied them, but none of them ever studied those adverbs as a special topic. By describing the origination and evolution of the kind of adverbs "geng"(更) respectively, this article has investigated into the usages of them from the point of view of the history of Chinese language in an all-around way, and probed into the generative mechanism of them and explained why they have evolved in such a way.The full text includes three parts as follows:The first part expounds the origination and evolution of the kind of adverbs "geng"(更). The part relatively describes the usages of them of the history of Chinese language in detail and points out the evolution of the core words of them based on counting their frequency of utilization and analyzing their relationship of collocation and congregation through representing the appearance of newborn words and the disappearance of old words.The second part discusses the generative mechanism of the kind of adverbs "geng"(更). Appling the general linguistics theory, it indicates that monosyllabic words of the kind of adverbs "geng"(更) as adverbial modifier are grammaticalized on the basis of their substantive meaning "change", while disyllabic words develop in the way of synonymy, agglutination of lexicon, overlapping and appending.The third part studies the evolution and cause of the kind of adverbs "geng"(更). The reasons for the form changes are that the same shapes vanish by themselves (sole-shaping) and the different ones are substituted by others (popularization). The principle of novelizing, simplification and definition lead to the evolution of core words of the kind of adverbs "geng"(更).