The Research Of "gei" Sentences In The First80Chapters Of Hongloumeng

Hongloumeng is an important corpus in the research of modern Chinese language. The language of the book is based on Beijing mandarin, absorbing the spoken language and proverbs, so it’s colloquial. Now people have reached a consensus about its forming age. Hongloumeng was finished during the transition period of modern Chinese, and the old and new alternate generated a lot of interesting language phenomenon, helping us fully understand the law of the development of Chinese. This paper is based on "gei" sentences in the first80chapters of Hongloumeng. On the basis of predecessors’research, this paper is trying to summarize the evolution of grammaticalization about "gei" by analyzing the different usage of it. The content of the paper roughly arranges as following:Chapter1is the introduction, mainly introducing Hongloumeng and the current research situation of "gei" sentences, presenting the linguistic value of Hongloumeng and the basic questions about this paper.Chapter2and3respectively introduce simple and complex "gei" sentences meaning "to give"; from the perspective of syntactic structure. Chapter2introduces six sentence patterns:"(S)+gei+NPi+NP2","(S)+gei+NP1","(S)+ba/lian+NP2+gei+NPi","NP2+gei+NP1","(S)+gei". Chapter3introduces the relevant sentence patterns about "(S)+V+gei+NP1+NP2","(S)+gei+NP1+NP2+V","(S)+V+NP2+gei+NP1", and makes detailed introduction about the related verbs. Structure classification gives us a better understanding about the development of "gei" sentences meaning "to give".Chapter4mainly discusses "gei" sentences with causative meaning, and it can be divided into complete and incomplete causative function. This chapter explores the motive of causativization of "gei" with the theory of figure salience. The verbs before "gei" is easily sensed as foreground information, and the meaning "to give" of "gei" as background information is weakened, which highlights the dynamic relationship between the two events. So "gei" sentences with causative function have arisen. Due to the use of the two usage of "gei" sentences have in common, so this chapter carries on a brief description about the difference of them.Chapter5gives an in-depth introduction about "gei" sentences with passive and the disposal meaning."Gei" sentences with passive meaning were evolved from causative meaning, and the causativization of "gei" can also be explained with the theory of figure salience. At last, this chapter summaries the grammaticalization of "gei" in Hongloumeng, and we can believe that "gei" completes the grammaticalization in the order of "meaning to give-causative meaning-passive meaning".