The Sematic Meaning And Grammatical Development Of Chinese Character “Ben(?)”and The Relationship Between Them

“Ben(?)” is a high-frequency Chinese character in contemporary Chinese language.Synchronicity,it can be used as a noun,a quantifier,a demonstrative pronoun,a adverb and a preposition.It also has many different meanings for it can both be a national word and a function word.Based on cognition-based functional perspective and grammaticalization,this research intends to discuss the usages and semantic development of this Chinese character,alone with the relationship among them,focusing on synchronic and diachronic perspective both.The whole research is comprised of six parts.Chapter one: the emergence of Ben(?).Through the theory of cognitive metaphor,the author analyzes the source of Ben in the weighing herbs and weighing books.Ben in the weighing herbs developing well in Qing Dynasty is not used in the modern Chinese.Ben in the weighing books produced in Southern and Northern Dynasties and grammaticalized in Song and Ming Dynasty are often used in modern Chinese.Chapter two: the emergence of “Ben(?)”.It is explored and discussed from “Ben +specific noun” and “Ben + abstract noun”.The paper also describes how it was developed from noun.“Ben + abstract” was emerged in the Warring States period,prosperous in Sui and Tang Dynasties.“Ben + abstract noun”appeared in Tang Dynasty,rapidly developed in Ming and Qing Dynasties and is used widely today.Chapter three: the emergence of “Ben(?)”.Ben was developed from the connotation of the noun “root” to a verb,and flexible use of vocabulary is one of the bases of evolution,including the syntactic environment,semantic change and its causes.It is formed into attributive structure and semantic void through distributed expansion in the structure of successive predicate.Meanwhile,the development of Ben was also observed and studied.Chapter four:the emergence of“Ben(?)”used as a adverb,including exploring the origin of the adverb-“Ben(?)”,along with its syntactic context and semantic feature and the mechanism behind them.This chapter also discussed the emergence and development of the compound adverb-”Benlai(??)”-where“Ben(?)”serves as a constituent within the word.Chapter five: conclusions,a brief summary of the whole research,including the secondary relationship between “Ben(?)”used as a verb and “Ben(?)”used as as a noun,a quantifier,a demonstrative pronoun,a adverb and a preposition,along with their grammatical circumstances and grammatical device.Deficiencies of this research were also included in this chapter.