Evolution of Deictic-of-Motion Expressions in Chinese

Abstract

This paper, based on a detailed corpus description, investigates the morphosyntactic evolution of Deictic-of-motion expressions in the history of Chinese language. It is revealed that morphosyntactic encodings of deictic information in Chinese have undergone a series of significant changes. （i） Some word orders that are ungrammatical in modern Mandarin Chinese, e.g., zou jin lai jiaoshi ‘walk into classroom’, are actually grammatical in Pre-Modern Chinese and some modern dialects. （ii） Prior to Middle Chinese, there does not exist the constructions where a motion verb is attached with a deictic element as complement, e.g., jin lai ‘enter-come’ and jin qu ‘enter-go’, and the deictic information is encoded as a separate motion event by a deictic main-verb; however, since Middle Chinese, the “verb-deictic complement” pattern starts to emerge. （iii） Before Middle Chinese, a deictic main-verb typically does not take any Ground element as its object, but afterwards this kind of syntactic constructions gradually come to be common. It is argued in this paper that the above diachronic changes are motivated by the change of diachronic extension of Linguistic Inventory Mightiness, i.e., the pattern of coordinate construction is gradually replaced by verb-complement pattern. The above morphosyntactic changes lead to a series of important effects on conceptual structure, e.g., the conceptual composition of Deictic, Path, and Ground. It indicates that the mapping from conceptual domain to semantics and then to syntax is not the whole picture, but the inverse mapping, i.e., syntactic pattern influences conceptual pattern can also be attested from a diachronic perspective. (This article is in Chinese.) 提要 本文對漢語運動事件指向信息編碼的句法搭配及其與一般路徑、參照背景的排序等的歷時演變做出了綜合描寫和分析。調查發現，漢語指向信息的編碼結構發生了較爲顯著的變化，表現在指向動詞與其他動詞連用的排序、路徑指向與背景的排序、攜帶背景賓語能力等方面。上述歷時演變的動因是漢語句法結構模式的歷時演變，主要表現爲聯合結構逐漸喪失其顯赫地位，進而讓位於動補結構。本文還指出，句法結構演變在概念結構模式上産生了一系列效應。這說明“概念→語義→句法”這樣的投射和决定關係并不總是適用，從歷時的角度來看，語言結構的演變會影響到與之相應的概念結構的演變。