The Multiple Investigation Of "napa(哪怕)"

At present, the investigation on concessive conjunction has made definite progress in linguistics circle. However, the investigation mainly focuses on the use of the representative words, such as "jishi (即使)", "jiushi (就是)", while "napa (哪怕)" is seldom concerned as one of concessive conjunctions. In fact, "napa (哪怕)" not only has the general characteristics, but has its own characteristics as well. Based on this angle, the paper systemically investigates "napa (哪怕)" from both diachronic and synchronic.In diachronic, the way of forming word of "napa (哪怕)" is quite different from other concessive conjunctions. The core morpheme "ji (即)" in "jishi (即使) " and "jiu (就) "in "jiushi (就是) " formed their own use as concessive conjunctions in ancient times or in middle-ancient times, but "napa (哪怕) "which was once a cross-layer architecture wasn't used as a concessive conjunction, the adherence word of the interrogative pronoun "na (哪)" which represents rhetorical question and the verb "pa (怕) ", until Yuan dynasty. The main motivation of grammaticalizaion of "napa (哪怕)" is that the negation of rhetorical question can't express sufficient information and needs new information to supplement.In synchronic, we mainly investigate the use of "napa (哪怕)" from 3 planes: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. In syntactic, although "napa (哪怕)" is a concessive conjunction , it still can be used in the position of adverb. In addition, "napa (哪怕)" can also be used as ending mark in abundance and we can trace back to this use in Ming and Qing dynasty. Therefore, we sum up the syntactic distribution into 3 formats: " X napa (哪怕) Y", "napa (哪怕) P and Q", and "(Q), napa (哪怕) P". In semantic, the meaning of "napa (哪怕)" as a concessive conjunction is different from other concessive conjunctions mainly including two aspects as follows: one is that concessive antecedent equals not "P", the other is that concessive antecedent is different from not "P" according to the format of "(O), napa (哪怕) P,Q". And also, "napa (哪怕)" has not only the concessive meaning but also emphasis meaning; the clauses of "napa (哪怕)" has not only adversative relations but also tandem relations. In pragmatic, we mainly analyze two aspects: one is the choice of the sentence type of "napa (哪怕)": it can be used in statement, interrogative, imperativeness and exclamation sentences, but other concessive conjunctions can't be used in imperativeness sentences; the other one is the relations between "napa (哪怕)" and subjective quantity. According to the analysis, we think that we can add both big and small subjective amounts after "napa". but in essence, it can be followed by meta big subjective amount.