A Historical Study On The Evolution Of "aru"(lady) In Kazakh

Kazakh falls on the Kipchak branch of the Turkic subgroup of the Altaic language family.It's an agglutinative language.Most of previous studies of it are from the perspectives of phonetics,phonology,morphology,semantics and syntax.Till now,few scholars have ever done a systematic research on the evolution of a certain word from the historical linguistics angle.Therefore,this thesis aims to put that right."aru" is a term of address in modern Kazakh referring to a young lady.Its usage in different contexts and its historical development bear traces of the evolution of Kazakh language as well as the unique culture of Kazakh people.Language evolution is a complex process of interaction of various factors.It is essential to take these factors into account when it comes to elucidate language evolution.The author is to describe and explain the historical evolution of "aru" in terms of language contact theory,grammaticalization and lexical diffusion theory.Aiming at presenting the usage of "aru" in different periods of Kazakh and the evolution of the term "aru",relevant literature covering dictionaries,books and papers on Kazakh is consulted,from which examples of "aru" are collected.Furthermore,employing literature review method and historical comparative method to picture the historical evolution course of "aru",the paper is mainly based on three questions.First,what is the origin of "aru"?Second,how does "aru" evolve in the course of Kazakh history?Third,what is the motivation behind the evolution of "aru" in Kazakh?The study has found that the historical development of "aru" is in accordance with complex evolution process of language.Its semantic and phonetic changes in different periods are a consequence of language contacts which are mainly intrafamily contacts and interfamily contacts.The historical development of "aru" as well as affixes "ar-"and "-u" have undergone a process of grammaticalization respectively.Its grammatical changes reveal linguistic variations on synchronic dimension from the perspective of diachronic evolution process.Although this study only discusses the historical evolution of an individual word"aru" in Kazakh,it provides some information for further researches on language change as well as evolution of Kazakh language.