‘X然’의 허화 의미 분석

Abstract

‘Ran’(然) was originally a substantive word in classical Chinese. However, its substantive meaning has been gradually disappearing and grammaticalized with the language change according to the passing of time, and then ‘ran’ has been mostly fixed as an affix, a constituent element of a word. While ‘X-ran’(X-然) has been becoming a complete word, a lot of new words with the form of ‘X+ran’ have been appearing. For example, there have been many words with forms of ‘noun+ran’, ‘verb+ran’ and ‘onomatopoeia+ran’ as well as ‘adjective+ran’. Such words are still made good use of in not a few cases in Mandarin Chinese now, keeping the ‘durability of meaning’. ‘X-ran’ has mostly produced the words of parts of speech(word classes) such as adjectives, adverbs and onomatopoeias playing roles of predicates, adverbials, abnominals and onomatopoeias in a sentence. Their functions are also almost unchanged in Mandarin Chinese.