Early Development of Demonstratives in Pre-Qin Chinese

This dissertation offers a new dynamic account of the evolution of the demonstrative system in pre-Qin Chinese based on a comprehensive linguistic analysis of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of demonstratives attested in two corpora of excavated texts, i.e. the oracle-bone inscriptions dated to the late Shang period (13th -- 11th centuries B.C.) and the bronze inscriptions from the Western Zhou (11th century -- 771 B.C.) to the Warring State period (475 -- 221 B.C.), and two earliest transmitted texts, i.e. the Book of Odes and the Book of Documents. By tracing the emergence and the development of each demonstrative form revealed by those texts and analyzing the diachronic and synchronic relationship among various demonstrative forms, this study shows that Chinese demonstratives underwent significant changes since the Western Zhou, and the complex system in Classical Chinese is due to diachronic strata, synchronic variations and specialization of certain grammatical functions in some demonstratives following the diachronic development and dialect contact.