From 'get' to 'can': A natural semantic metalanguage study of Chinese de constructions in three pre-modern text samples.

摘要

This dissertation is a text-based study of Chinese de constructions in excerpts from Lunheng (1st century), Dunhuang Bianwen (9/10th centuries), and Jinpingmei (16th century). Historically a verb similar to "get, obtain", de has over the course of its history been associated with the expression of tense/aspect (cf get sick), possibility (cf get to go, gotta go), passive (cf get fired), result (cf get sick from something), and manner. It is thus of particular interest in the study of tense/aspect/modality expressions evolving from lexical verbs.; A problem in the study of de--and of tense/aspect/modality systems in general--has been the unsystematic use of semantically complex terms to characterize meaning. This study addresses that problem by explicating meaning in Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Wierzbicka 1996), a mini-language comprised of semantic primitives (e.g., I, YOU, SOMEONE, HAPPEN, CAN) which are believed to have counterparts in all known languages. This approach not only avoids the pitfalls of traditional terminology, but is useful for cross-linguistic comparison because its terms--and its concepts--are (near-)universal.; Using NSM, this study proposes for each major de construction attested in the data an explicit semantic account which reveals links across construction types, both synchronically and over time. X de NP ("X gets NP") for example, is explicated as meaning "Something happens. Because of this, X has NP." Rather than stopping at a paraphrase like "X gets NP", this semantic account captures the notions of happening and result that link nearly all de-constructions sharing that lexical source, including those where de is postverbal. X de VP ("X gets to VP", "X gets VP-ed") is explicated as "Something happens. Because of this, X VP.", which captures its historical link to X de NP and demonstrates how preverbal de could have come to express CAN--namely, through the pragmatic inference that a HAPPENing not only can have a result, but can enable one.