A Study Of The Use Of Classifier Ge In The Story Of The Stone From The Perspective Of Decategorization

With semantic and functional meanings,classifier is a special part of speech in Chinese.Classifier ge is a unique one among classifiers.It shows different features at different historical periods.As a general classifier in most cases,sometimes,it is used as a non-classifier according to corpus data.Concerning the development of Chinese,Qing Dynasty witnessed its significant transition from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese.This study intends to explore the uses of classifier ge in Qing Dynasty.The Story of the Stone,accomplished in Qing Dynasty,is a masterpiece in the history of Chinese classical novel and can reflect the use of language at that period.Based on above facts,this study investigates the various usages of classifier ge in Qing Dynasty on the foundation of a closed corpus of The Story of the Stone from the perspective of decategorization.This novel was finished at an early time(about mid-period of 18th century).Later,various hand-copied versions of The Story of the Stone appeared.Among various versions,gengchen version was copied at an early time(approximately finished after 1761 A.D.)and it was completely preserved(78 chapters remained).The nantu version(version preserved in Nanjing library)embodied a kind of hand-copied version that was collated systematically.On the basis of above-mentioned advantages,this study adopts gengchen version and nantu version published respectively in 1993 and 2011 by People's Literature Publishing House to reveal the original appearance of master copies of The Story of the Stone in Qing Dynasty.The objectives of the study are to find the frequencies of classifier ge and its variations in the novel,further to generalize the features of the usages of classifier ge and to reveal its rules in use and its mechanisms to cause different collocations and usages.Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to analyze the distributional features and the specific cases of the use of classifier ge.On the one hand,the quantitative method is helpful to find the distributional features of classifier ge at a macro level.The statistics show that there are total 3857 occurrences of ge,3748 occurrcences of classifier ge and 109 occurrences of non-classifier ge in The Story of the Stone.On the other hand,it is beneficial to employ qualitative method to examine the specific cases of the usages of classifier ge,such as classifier ge used to modify different expressions of persons and objects,demonstrative words zhege and nage and ge used as constructional particle.The combination of the two methods is effective to provide a comprehensive examination for the study.The main findings of the study suggest that(1)classifier ge has a wide collocation scale;(2)classifier ge develops into three different usages gradually:classifier,particle and a morpheme of demonstrative word in Qing Dynasty;(3)the use of ge as classifier leads a prominent part in the total occurrences of ge;(4)the use of ge as constructional particle occupies the largest proportion of the entire non-classifier use;(5)it is inferred that the non-classifier usages of ge are derived from its classifier use.This study demonstrates the complicated usages of classifier ge and proposes a beneficial view both for the further explorations of the development of Chinese classifier and the studies of the novel The Story of the Stone.