Study Of Grammaticalization Of Clause Combining Strategies

The first use of the term "grammaticalization" in Meillet (1912) has marked the modern approaches to the study of grammaticalization. "'Grammaticalization' is a process which turns lexemes into grammatical formatives and renders grammatical formatives still more grammatical" (Lehmann 1982). Most of the studies have focused on how a lexical item becomes a grammatical item, which has been regarded as the typical case of grammaticalization. Giv6n (1979) proposes the possibility of incorporating the combining process of clauses into the research of grammaticalization, which extends the sense of grammaticalization to the levels of syntax and discourse. On the basis of the previous studies, this dissertation makes further attempts to manifest the pathway of the grammaticalization of complex sentence structures in the history of English and Chinese and then to dig out the mechanisms and more underlying enabling factors in motivating the change in clause combining strategies, so as to test whether clause combining strategies have followed the cline "parataxis > hypotaxis > subordination" proposed by Hopper and Traugott (2001: 170), and finally to demonstrate whether there is university existing in the syntactic change of the two languages. This thesis is composed of six chapters:...