The Development Of Chinese Auxiliary Words From Late Tang Dynasty And Five Dynasties To Early Ming Dynasty

This paper diachronically studies the development of early mandarin Chinese auxiliary system of the 9th-14 th century on the basis of six corpora reflecting the characteristics of oral mandarin from late Tang Dynasty andFive Dynasties to late YuanDynasty and early Ming Dynasty. The whole paper has sixparts: Introduction, Structural Auxiliary Words, Dynamic Auxiliary Words,Aspectual-modal AuxiliaryWords, Modal Auxiliary Words and Conclusion.The part of “Introduction” mainly defines the scope of auxiliary words, illustrates the classification of auxiliary words and discusses the ownership of auxiliary words with the idea that modal particles belong to auxiliary words.Therefore, the auxiliary system from late Tang Dynasty andFive Dynasties to late YuanDynasty and early Ming Dynasty can be divided into four categories: structural auxiliary words, dynamic auxiliary words, aspectual-modal auxiliary words and modal auxiliary words.The second chapter analyzes the development of structural auxiliary words from late Tang Dynasty and Five Dynasties to early MingDynasty. Structural auxiliary words include narrow structural auxiliary words, metaphorical auxiliary words, approximate auxiliary wordsand enumerative auxiliary words, etc. In the 9th-14 th century, the three structural auxiliary words---“de(的)”, “di(地)”, “de(得)” all can be used in the modifier-head construction and the adverbial-verb structure; only “de(的)”, “de(得)” both can appear in the predicate-complement structure. The paper counts the syntactic position of “de(的)”, “di(地)”,“de(得)” in the six representative corpus,draws a parallel between attributive auxiliary words such as “zhi(之)”, “di(底)”, and diachronically studies the main grammatical functions and the alternative changes of them in the language.Thenmetaphorical auxiliary words in the period of early mandarin Chinese gradually tend to be completely developed and the syntactic form “(metaphorical verb+) nominal/predicate+ metaphorical auxiliary word”, consistent with the modern Chinese, also has been basically established. And last, in the aspect of approximate auxiliary words, “yu(馀)”and “lai(来)”, widely used in modern Chinese, have a steady development; “duo(多)” was not used until the end of the Yuan Dynasty and the early Ming while “xu(许)”, conventional in ancient Chinese, is almost incidental in early mandarin Chinese.The third chapter is on dynamic auxiliary words.As for dynamic auxiliary, this part specifically studies the evolution of “le(了)”, “que(却)”, “guo(过)”, “jiang(将)”, “zhe(着)” in the 9th-14 thcentury. The dynamic auxiliary“le(了)” meaning “finish”gradually replaces “que( 却)” which has the similar function of syntax in early mandarin Chinese.The dynamic auxiliary“guo(过)” is not widespread in early mandarin Chinese but basically used as a verb complement.And the “verb(+object)+directional complement”structure in the modern Chinese was often inserted into the dynamic auxiliary“jiang( 将)”in this stage of development, thus it formed the “verb+ ‘jiang’(+object)+directional complement”structure. The dynamic auxiliary “zhe(着)” in early mandarin Chinese can present “something finished” or “something continuing”, but it mainly presents “something continuing” according to the statistical data from the six corpus.The forth chapter is on aspectual-modal auxiliary words. In this part, the author specifically studies the development of “le(了)”, “lai(来)” and “qu(去)”from late Tang Dynasty and Five Dynasties to early MingDynasty. At the beginning of the early mandarin Chinese, “le(了)” and “lai(来)” were strictly applied to “something finished” semantic sentences; “qu(去)” was used to mean “something will happen”. However, as the grammatical function of “le(了)” and “lai(来)” expanded, “qu(去)”gradually withdrew from history since the Song Dynasty. Meanwhile, this chapter also discusses the criteria between dynamic auxiliary and aspectual-modal auxiliary.Due to the big differences of modal auxiliary wordsin each historical stage, the fifthchapter, from four aspects of declarative modal particles, interrogative modal particles, imperative modal particles and exclamative modal particles, systematically describes the overall appearance of the modal auxiliary words in each representativecorpus with a synchronic view, and then carries on the diachronic comparison of “ ‘ye(也)’/ ‘yi(矣)’”(common particles), “me(摩/么/麽/末)”(aberrant particles) and “‘shi(时)’/ ‘he( 呵)’”(iterative particles). In the 9th-14 thcentury, the function of “ye”( 也) was unceasinglystrengthened; on the contrary, the function of “yi( 矣)” was correspondinglyweakened. In late Tang and Five Dynasties, “me(摩)” was largely used with other written forms of “me(么/麽/末)” which laid a foundation for the formation of the modern Chinese particle “ma(吗)”. In this period, the up-and-coming auxiliary “ni(聻)/(你/尼)” became a precursor to “ne(呢)”. In Yuan Dynasty, “he(呵)” partly affected by Mongolian, was used at the end of the previous clause of a hypothetical complex sentence, but in the end, it was replaced by “shi(时)” which originally was a hypothetical modal particle.Summaries of research breakthroughs and unsolved problemsare introduced in the conclusion part.In auxiliary theory,this paper discusses in several ways modal particles shall be regarded as a small class of auxiliary,unnecessary to be classified as one new part of speech.On the distinction between dynamic auxiliary and aspectual-modal auxiliary,combining the syntactic and semantic elements,the author sumsup the five specific criteria for the identification of aspectual-modal auxiliary.In the case study of auxiliary words,this paper diachronically and systematically studies the mixed use of“de(的/地/得)”in the9th-14th century,summarizes the seven kinds of syntactic structures when the quantifier“ge(个)”changed into the structural particle“ge(个)”,and then analyzes the special featuresof“qu lai(去来)”and“lai(来)”.Moreover,this section also systematically studiesthe development of the Chinese auxiliary system in the 9th-14th century on global scale.At the same time,it points out the retained problems,especially in terms of the comparative study of synonymic auxiliary,to which the predecessors have paid attention but the outcome is in total not enough.And this is of great research value with a great deal of research space,only leaving to be studied in the future.