The Semantic Origin Of The Quest Prepositions In Chinese

In the history of Chinese,the quest prepositions used to represent the action of “seek”.It is a category of object prepositions,such as “Yu(?)?Wen(?)?Yu(?)?He(?)?Ti(?)?Xiang(?)?Chong(?)?Zhu(?)?Jiu(?)?Gen(?)?Cong(?)”.These prepositions all not directly originated from verb,but the result of the expansion of function on prepositions.In this thesis,in order to generalized their semantic evolving,we select the perspective of historical linguistics,then we do detailed analysis on them.It concludes five chapters:The first chapter is introduction.In this part,we introduced the definition of the study object.We,meanwhile,summarized the research situation about its classification and source.The predecessors' research results give rise to our thinking for the source of the quest prepositions,and we summarized two semantic evolution models.One part is single source,namely,these quest prepositions originated from the prepositions which introduce some kind of object.In this part,we have two aspects: one originated from the prepositions which introduce talker,such as “Wen(?)?Yu(?)?He(?)?Ti(?)?Xiang(?)?Chong(?)”.The other originated from the prepositions which introduce direction,such as “Zhu(?)”.Another is multiple source,namely,these prepositions have complex contact with already existing prepositions,such as “Gen(?)?Jiu(?)”.In the second chapter,we choose the aspects of semantic foundation and syntax to discuss the semantic evolution of the quest prepositions.It will be divided into two sections that depend on the semantic origin: the first section conclude the quest prepositions which originated from the talk prepositions.It mainly contains five ways: “verd—talk—quest”? “verb—interactive—talk—quest”?“accept—talk—quest”.The second section conclude the quest prepositions which originated from the learn prepositions.Then,in the third chapter,we analyzed and described the evolution path of the quest prepositions,such as “Cong(?)”.The fourth part is basis on the second and third part.We attempt to distinguishing between the quest prepositions and the other object prepositions that have contact with it.In this part,we summarized two judgment standards that is the verb classes and context.The fifth part is the full text of the summary.