英文摘要 |
This paper discusses the grammatical transformation of Chinese Shi-yi verbs into both conditional conjunctions and concessive conditional conjunctions, which are respectively exemplified by the historical developments of the requesting verbs shi (使) and ling (令) and the letting verbs rao (饒) and ren (任).The first part of this paper focuses on the processes, conditions and mechanisms for the two paths of grammatical transformation. It argues that the mechanism for the first grammatical transformation is metonymy, whereas the second is metaphor. By comparison with other conditionals and concessive conditionals, this paper also demonstrates that the conditionals derived from Shi-yi constructions have the characteristic of being ”counterfactual,” whereas the concessive conditionals derived from Shi-yi constructions have the characteristic of being ”contrastive.”The second part of this paper focuses on cross-linguistic comparison. The parallel development of the Greek as is introduced to show that the grammaticalization discussed in this paper is not unique to Chinese. The conditions and mechanisms of the grammaticalization of as proposed by Nikiforidou (1996) can also be used to support the analysis in this paper. Finally, this paper points out that the two paths of grammaticalization are from parataxis to hypotaxis, similar to the cline of clause-combining constructions proposed by Hopper and Traugott (2003 [1993]). |