The Nature, Function And Evolution Of Modern Chinese "?"

Focusing on the preposition ‘you' in modern Chinese,this thesis is based on the theories studied by previous researchers and applies the theories of grammaticalization,lexicalization and subjectivisation to analyze the main introduction function of ‘you' and its grammatical development track from diachronic and synchronic perspectives.The thesis mainly includes the following sections.1.It is explained why this topic is chosen,what the current research status is,how this research is conducted and where the corpus sources come from.2.Taking the grammatical trajectory as a clue,starting from a longitudinal perspective,the grammaticalization trajectory of the preposition ‘you' is analyzed.One trend is “Verb ? Preposition ? Conjunction” based on the function that introduces the starting points ‘X',and the other is "Verb ? Preposition ? Marking" based on the function that introduces the agents ‘X'.The thesis puts the main usages of ‘you' into a framework and tries to explain the motivations and mechanisms of its grammaticalization.3.On the basis of the function that introduces the starting points of ‘you',this part analyzes the syntactic structure,semantic types and construction definition of the structure ‘you X dao Y'.It is generally believed that due to the influence of the part of speech of “dao”,the structure “you X dao Y” has two forms—endocentric structure and coordinative structure.The semantics of these two structures are the changes of things and the scope of cognition.So its function extends from the starting point to the end point.The definition of the construction will be affected by many factors,and the coordinative structure is more inclined to the construction.4.Based on the function that introduces the agents of ‘you',this part analyzes the‘you'-sentence,including its definition and types,the characteristics of the components inside and the horizontal comparison with the ‘bei'-sentence.There is some new research on the topic of ‘you'-sentence.The thesis demonstrates that the structure like “you+X+VP+NP” promotes the tokenization of ‘you' and passive meaning in ‘you'-sentence like ‘NP+you+X+VP' should not be considered as the same as the ‘bei'-sentence.5.Taking the higher grammaticalization level of ‘you' as a direction,this part analyzes the conditions for the formation and appearing of ‘you' under the unbalancedgrammaticalization.The existence of ‘you' is influenced by the syntactic structure,stylistic semantics,and the internal rhythm of the sentence.Therefore a prediction about the ‘zero form' is proposed.6.The introduction function of ‘you' and the limitations in the thesis,and some problems to be solved in the future are summarized respectively.