HISTORY OF SOME COORDINATIVE CONJUNCTIONS IN CHINESE

漢語並列連詞的歷史

劉堅(Liu Jian) ； 貝羅貝(Alain Peyraube)

《Journal of Chinese Linguistics》 22卷2期 (1994/06) Pp. 179-201

摘要

This paper analyzes the historical development of the Chinese coordinative conjunctions and reveals the importance in Chinese of degrees of grammaticalization. Grammaticalization is defined as follows: ＂process which consists in the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status＂ (Kurylowicz 1965). It is shown that the coordinative conjunctions which connect two or more NP don't come directly from verbs, as it is widely agreed (by Wang Li 1958, Pan Yunzhong 1982, or even Liu Jian 1989), but from prepositions which themselves come from verbs. In other words, there have been two processes of grammaticalization, one transforming a verb into a preposition, and the other one transforming the preposition into a conjunction, in that order. Thus, conjunctions are more grammaticalized than prepositions. This is true for all the stages of Chinese: Archaic Chinese, Medieval Chinese, Modern Chinese, Contemporary Chinese.

並列摘要

本文分析漢語並列連詞的歷史發展，同時指出漢語語法化程度的重要性。把兩個及兩個以上的NP連接起來的並列連詞並不是如一般所說的直接來自動詞，而是來自介詞，而介詞是來自動詞。換言之，一共有兩個語法化過程：首先是將動詞轉為介詞，然後是將介詞轉為連詞的兩個過程。因此，連詞比介詞更為語法化。這個情形在漢語發展各個階段中皆如是：上古、中古、近代漢語、現代漢語。