Diachronic Evolution Of "Gather" Verbs In Chinese

The paper takes the lexical system of Chinese "gather" verbs as the object of study and the semantic field theory as the background,through a combination of diachronic investigation and synchronic description,adopts the method of literature survey research,comparative analysis and graphical to analyzes and explains the usage of Chinese "gather" verbs in various periods,clarifies their development process,and clarify the succession and substitution.On the basis of the description,it reveals the main features of the evolution of the semantic field members of "gather" verbs over time,and explores the internal reasons that drive their evolution.The text is divided into seven parts.The first chapter is the introduction,which mainly introduces the research status,research objectives,research methods,research significance and innovation.At the same time,it also explains the word selection criteria of "gather" meaning verbs,Chinese historical stages and selection of corpus.The second to fourth chapters specifically analyze the number of members,semantic division of labor,combinational relations,frequency of use and scope of application of the semantic field of "gather" verbs in the representative documents of the Old Chinese,Middle Chinese and Early Modern Chinese.The analysis was based on monosyllabic verbs,and also on the juxtaposition of synonymic combinations within the semantic field.The fifth chapter investigates the similarities and differences of 53 disyllabic "gather" verbs in modern Chinese in terms of their scope of use,semantic emphasis,frequency of use and collocation targets.The sixth chapter summarizes the characteristics and reasons for the evolution of "gather" verbs over time,based on both diachronic investigation and synchronic analysis.The last chapter is the conclusion,which mainly summarizes the content of the whole article and points out the shortcomings of the article.The study found that there were 17 monosyllabic "gather" verbs in the Old Chinese period,"Tuan(团)""Cu(簇)"added in the Middle age and a new verb "Long(拢)" join the Early Modern period.During the evolutionary process,these monosyllabic "gather" verb members have a strong stability.Except for "Zu(族),which was replaced by "Cu(簇)" in Early Modern Chinese,and "Zui(最)",which withdrew from the semantic field in the Ming Dynasty,all other members remained in use at different stages.Since the Old Chinese period,it has been a phenomenon that the monosyllabic verbs of "gather" were used in parallel to form synonymy combination,and the number of juxtaposed synonym combinations has been increasing in the Middle Chinese and Early Modern periods.According to the statistics of this paper,the number of combinations has grown from 13 in the in the Old Chinese period to 28 in the Middle ages,and to 41 in the Early Modern Chinese period,most of the 53 disyllable "gather" verbs in Modern Chinese are also inherited from the Ancient Chinese.Although the number of synonymous combinations exceeded that of monosyllabic words from the Middle Ages to Early Modern times,the frequency of use of monosyllabic "gather" verbs has been dominant.It was not until Modern Chinese that that monosyllabic "gather" verbs declined abruptly in both number of members and frequency of use,and they were almost completely replaced by disyllable.There are five features in the evolution of "gather" verbs over time: first,the evolution process is a unity of stability and variability;secondly,the lexical derivation mode has changed from phonetic-meaningful to morphemic synthesis;thirdly,words with a predominant frequency of independent use in the semantic field have a stronger ability to combine;fourthly,the phenomenon of combining the same elements in reverse order is more common,and their lexical connotations are more consistent;fifthly,the analogous derivation of word meanings is sometimes seen.There are three main internal reasons for the evolution of "gather" verbs over time: firstly,the role of cognitive factors such as sound resemblance,metonymy and associative mechanisms;secondly,the fictionalization of word meanings;and finally,the basic requirement of avoiding ambiguity in vocabulary and the influence of the principle of economy in language.