Chapter Six Conclusion
6.1 Research Findings
The definition“xiang+X”construction can be explained from three levels:participants number of event,the relations and semantic roles of participants.According to the part of speech of“X”in the collected 10,052 data of“xiang+X”construction,the four types of research object is summarized.
Based on diachronic construction grammar,this thesis discusses thecharacteristics of“xiang+X”construction from the morph-syntactic and semanticperspective with the empirical method of diachronic corpus.In regard to themorph-syntactic properties,there are four syntactic forms in the diachronic evolutionof the construction:NP1+xiang+V+(O);NP1+xiang+V1+V2+(O);NP1+xiang+V1+xiang+V2;NP1+hù+xiang+V.And“xiang”experiences the evolution path of“contentword-function word-auxiliary word”(i.e.,verb-adverb-pronoun-affix).With respect to the semantic properties,the constructional meaning has three types:(Western ZhouDynasty)reciprocal meaning→(Eastern Zhou Dynasty)unidirectional meaning→(Western Han Dynasty)collective meaning.
The three constructional meaning form a competitive relationship in differenthistorical periods,and there are two kinds of competitive results:one party dies andone party dominates.In the process of diachronic evolution,collective meaninggradually disappeared,the frequency of unidirectional meaning gradually decreased,and reciprocal meaning gained the dominant position.The essence of the semanticevolution is that the symmetric interaction between participants changes from directrelation to implicit relation.
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