A Diachronic Study Of Chinese Appositive Construction From A Sociolinguistic Perspective

Chinese co-referential appositive construction(hereafter “appositive construction”),represented by ‘Personal Pronoun(hereafter PP)+ one-Classifier +Noun Phrase(hereafter NP)’,has been given much attention,particularly from a pragmatic perspective since the construction combined with the following comments are highly subjective and reflect the certain social evaluation towards a specific social group during a certain historical period.The evaluative meaning conveys the social evaluation regarding the personal identities of the group denoted by the NP.Drawing on social role theory,this study selects 1150 sentences containing the target construction from the BCC corpus to examine the diachronic trends of the appositive construction and the factors influencing the social evaluative meaning.The present study set eight social factors that may potentially influence the negativity of the evaluation of the specific NP.Quantitative and statistical methods including logistic regression are adopted to generate the results.The findings of this study can be summarized in two aspects.Firstly,the results indicate that the diachronic changes of the appositive construction correspond to the historical development of personal pronouns,classifiers,and numerals.The limited availability of certain slots reflects the semantic constraints of the construction.Secondly,the statistical results demonstrate that the social evaluation conveyed by the target construction and its context tends to become more neutral and positive over time,although negative evaluations still predominate overall.Additionally,by adjusting the parameters,this study identifies three stages of historical periods that influence the polarity of social evaluation.The first stage encompasses the pre-Qin period to the Song Dynasty,the second stage covers the Song Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty,with significant factors being age,marriage,education,and place of residence.The third stage includes the modern era,where social status and occupation play significant roles.Furthermore,this study identifies gender differences as significant factors affecting social evaluation.Finally,based on a top-down framework focusing on speakers’ social identity from the social,family,and individual perspectives,the study discusses the findings from multiple dimensions and interprets them from a sociological perspective in conjunction with historical facts.This study adopts a data-based approach to study Chinese constructions from a sociolinguistic perspective.In this way,it provides a new research paradigm for the subjective study of Chinese constructions,expand the scope of subjective research,and provides empirical evidence for related interdisciplinary research in linguistics and sociology.