‘X然’의 문법화와 어휘화 연구 — 변천 기제를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper attempts to study the X-RAN structure that has produced a number of compound words in modern Chinese from the diachronic perspective of Grammaticalization and Lexicalization. After the RAN’s grammaticalization has been achieved, the process of lexicalized into adjectives, onomatopoeia, adverbs, conjunction was examined through the language change mechanism. In the Zhanguo Period, the RAN was already used as a demonstrative pronoun, its usage expands to everyday life, language users have come to a stage where they know the meaning of the deixis and don’t have to mention it, the original meaning of deixis of RAN was bleached and neglected. Among the pronoun, especially the predicative demonstrative pronoun only presents things, actions and shapes, therefore it has generation, abstraction and instability, these points made its semantic change possible. In ancient Chinese, the RAN was already used as a suffix of the adjective and later X-RAN was also used as a suffix of the onomatopoeia through the mechanism of analogy, the onomatopoeia which was used alone has function that indicated sound with the RAN attached. Because of the syntactic feature of the predicative demonstrative pronoun, the RAN and the adverbs of the follow were reanalyzed into a single word, adverb. The suffix of conjunction X-RAN is the result of the lexicalization, it went through the mechanism of reanalysis and absorption in the complex sentence.