| Chinese tendency verbs have been constantly interested by linguistic researchers for longtime because of their complicated idea graphical function and special syntactic form. The four basic components of Chinese tendency system consist of "verb+shang", "verb+xia", "verb+lai" and "verb+qu", which play substantial roles in composing compound tendency complements as well. As antonyms of semantic symmetry, "shang" and "xia", as well as "lai" and "qu" reveal some intriguing language phenomena in semantic bleach, and are worthy of thorough study. The thesis focuses on the form of "verb+shang/xia" and "verb+lai/qu". The study is based on the semantic evolution, syntactic form evolution, and the statistical analysis on basic corpus. The symmetry of semantics and form of "verb+shang/xia" and "verb+lai/qu" is described objectively,and the origin of the asymmetry between their semantics and syntactic form is discussed. The thesis contains six chapters:chapter 1 is an introduction, the main part is from chapter 2 to chapter 5, and it is concluded in chapter 6.Chapter 1 is the introduction part. I describe the motivation of the project and define the objects of the research. The methodology and the data source are also briefly outlined.A background review is given in chapter 2, where I overview the international researches in the grammaticalization of languages, Chinese tendency system and grammaticalization of Chinese tendency verbs.Chapter 3 focuses on the grammaticalization of the form "verb+shang/xia". The problems presented in our domestic institutes are discussed. Then I show that the semantics of "verb+shang/xia" develops in four procedures, i.e. tendency expressions, spatial expressions, non-spatial expressions, and then aspect expressions. On the other hand, the evolution of syntactic form has five procedures, i.e. "verb+er+shang/xia", "verb+shang/xia+LP", "verb+shang/xia+NP2","verb+shang/xia+C", and then "verb+shang/xia+null". Based on patient object shift and Chinese double syllable, the reanalysis of the evolution of syntactic form and the parallel structure "verb+shang/xia" shows that they are related to attributive structure. The asymmetries in semantics and syntactic form of "verb+shang/xia" correspond to their prototype effect of core semantics.The grammaticalization of the other object "verb+lai/qu" is studied in chapter 4. Although the semantic evolution of this is the same as the one above, the syntactic form evolution behaves differently. The two sets of pairs, "verb+lai/qu+LP" and "verb+LP+lai/qu", "verb+lai/qu+NP2" and "verb+NP2+lai/qu", are the most significant in the evolution. Among the components, "verb+LP+lai/qu" and "verb+lai/qu+NP2" are more grammaticalization than their rivals. The sentence pattern of "verb+lai/qu+LP" remained alive till Dream of Red Mansions in Qing dynasty. and then "verb+lai/qu" lost its independent verb quality completely, indicting the end of the tendency semantic evolution. On the other hand, the aspect expressons of "verb+lai/qu" came up pretty early, while it vanished in modern Chinese. The asymmetry between the semantics and syntactic form of "verb+lai/qu" arose from the different reference point.In chapter 5, the significance of typology of the evolution of "verb+shang/xia" and "verb+lai/qu" is analyzed. The semantic evolution of tendency verbs in Chinese language shows the typology characteristic of movement verbs in world languages.The conclusion is given in chapter 6, with some drawbacks of the thesis pointed out.
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