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Grammatical Development and Semantic Change of the Qià-Based Lexical Cluster: From Objective Match to Subjective Evaluation

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12278))

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Abstract

This study aims to analyze the semantic change of qià (恰), which has experienced a grammatical shift from a monosyllabic adverb to a set of related disyllabic words. Qià first appeared in the Six Dynasties as a pre-verbal adverb to express a coincidental situation in time, space, or quantity. It then began to collocate with a predictive element to form a cluster of qià-based disyllabic words with partially shared meanings. Due to semantic weakening of qià and strengthening of a collocating predicate in the lexicalization processes, this lexical cluster acquired semantically varied meanings with different pragmatic implications. The collocation of qià with verbal elements, such as qià-rú (恰如) and qià-sì (恰似), appeared as verbal phrases, and the adjectival qiàhǎo (恰好) and the adverbial qiàqià (恰恰) were also derived in the Tang and Song periods. Later in the Ming Dynasty, the originally adjectival qiàqiǎo (恰巧) was used more frequently as an adverb, and a new adjective qiàdàng (恰当) was formed to take up the adjectival function of qiàhǎo. The three adverbials qiàhǎo, qiàqià and qiàqiǎo were then fully lexicalized. Although these disyllabic words are all derived from qià, they differ in semantic and pragmatic functions in profiling various facets and evaluative polarities in terms of expectation or presupposition and eventually acquired more subjectivized meanings. This study shows that the grammaticalization processes of the lexical cluster were triggered by usage-based collocational patterns and have undergone semantic changes in line with the pragmatic force of subjectification.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Examples in (1) and (3) are cited from pages 446 and 445 of [8], and (2) is from page 717 of [9].

  2. 2.

    The Center for Chinese Linguistics Corpus (CCL): ccl.pku.edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpus/.

  3. 3.

    Implied adversative relation is a kind of presupposition in adversative relationship, which means “if A, then more likely (M1) not B, but the result is B”. See [11] and [12] for more details.

  4. 4.

    This paper use + the ancient Chinese corpus of the Chinese Linguistics Research Center of Peking University. The corpus has more than 170 million words. Besides 5 examples, another example from Tao Yuanming’s poem of “Guiniao • qiyi” is 和风弗恰, 翻翮求心, which is 和风不洽 in some editions. Qià 洽 is explained in Guangyun as ‘harmony’. There are doubts about the character qià 恰 here, which is more likely to be qià洽.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Cheng Lei of Wuhan University, Yang Dan of Beijing Union University, and He Tianqi of the City University of Hong Kong for their kind help with the historical data. This research was supported by the Beijing Philosophy and Social Sciences Youth Fund Project under the grant No. 19YYC019 (A Study of Emphatic Markers Based on Beijing Natural Spoken Language Corpus), the National Social Science Fund of China under the grant No. 16BYY114 (A Thematic Study of Chinese Conjunction Based on the Semantic Map), and the Academic Research Project of Beijing Union University (No. JS10202003). All errors remain our own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Teacher’s College, Beijing Union University, Beijing, 100101, China

    Ying Lu

  2. Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Meichun Liu

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  1. Ying Lu
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  2. Meichun Liu
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Meichun Liu

  2. Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kongg, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Chunyu Kit

  3. School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qi Su

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Lu, Y., Liu, M. (2021). Grammatical Development and Semantic Change of the Qià-Based Lexical Cluster: From Objective Match to Subjective Evaluation. In: Liu, M., Kit, C., Su, Q. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12278. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81197-6_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81197-6_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-81196-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-81197-6

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