The Subjectification Of Temporal Connectives In English And Chinese

From the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics, subjectivity, which is recognized as a human cognitive motivation, plays an important role in the formation and evolution of words. 'Subjectivity' in this study is defined as the expression of self and representation of a speaker's perspective and point of view in the propositions. 'Subjectification' is defined as the structures and strategies that languages evolve in the linguistic realization of subjectivity or as the relevant processes of linguistic evolution themselves.The study object of this thesis is temporal connectives which refers to a kind of word that connects two clauses and indicates the temporal relationship between the two clauses, such as since in English and 'shi(æ—¶)' in Chinese. The purpose of this thesis is to study the universals of the development of these temporal connectives that is the subjectification of these temporal connectives.There are many kinds of logical relationships between clauses, for example: conditional relationship, adversative relationship, concessive relationship and causal relationship etc. They used to be expressed by the use of connectives or adverbs, thus we have conditional connectives, adversative connectives, concessive connectives, causal connectives etc. What studied in this thesis is how the logical markers developed from temporal connectives through subjectification. The subjectification in nature belongs to the further grammaticalization of grammatical markers.According to Traugott, semantic change is a subjectification process, and a semantic-pragmatic process which makes the expression develop from low subjectivity to high subjectivity. Grammatical markers tend to develop toward the direction of subjectification just like semantic changes.The subjectification of temporal connectives does not only exist in one language but exists widely in many languages of many countries. This thesis illustrated the subjectification of temporal connectives in English and Chinese, on the basis of which this paper also explores the human being's language universals from a typological point of view with the help of available research achievements from the domestic and international society.