Investigating The Multi-functional Model Of The Construction Of X-yu And Its Evolution

The construction X-yu(-?)in modem Chinese performs a variety of functions in terms of the part of speech.We believe that language contact is one of the causes of the evolution of this multi-functional construction,which was mostly ignored in the past studies.Based on our assumptions,we depicted and analyzed in detail the evolution of the youygu,duiyu,zhongyu and xianyu from the pespective of language contact,we also compared them with jianyu and yiyu,which are lexicalized from the cross-layered structure,thus proving that language contact has played a crucial role in the evolution of multi-functional construction of X-yu.This thesis consists of 5 parts:Chapter 1 is an introduction of the selection of this topic,literature review and the corpus we will employ.In Chapter 2 we analyzed the evolution of the Conj-Prep youyu and the preposition duiyu,and claimed that,rather than being lexicalized from the cross-layered structures in Chinese languages,they were in fact created by the progressives in order to translate the Japanese Compound-case-Auxiliaries niyotte and nitaisfite/nitaisuru,of which the mechanism is termed as grammatical replication.In Chapter 3 we dealt with the adverb zhongyu and the verb xianyu.We found that there are two zhongyu and xianyu respectively in Chinese.Zhongyu1 and xianyu1,were lexicalized from the cross-layered structure,while the zhongyu2 and xianyu2 were derived from the Japanese adverb tsuini and the verb nikagiru separately.The mechanism is called lexical replication.In Chapter 4 we discussed the Conj-Prep jianyu and the verb yiyu,and proved that their becoming prosodic word is a pivotal step of the lexicalization.The syntactic circumstance is an important cause for the grammaticalization of jianyu.The mechanisms therein involve the rhythm,the reanalysis and the analogy.In Chapter 5 we drew the conclusions based on our evidence and proposed our explanations and hypotheses.