International Journal of Asian Language Processing 29(2):61-86 61 The Syntactic Evolvement of the Chinese Word “Wei” Yan Li School of Foreign Languages, Shaanxi Normal University Xi’an, China, 710062
[email protected] Abstract Based on Beijing University CCL corpus, this article investigated the functions and meanings of the word “Wei”(维) in different dynasties. “维” could be a word in ancient times while it functions as verb, noun, pronoun, preposition, auxiliary word, etc.. But from West Jin Dynasty there appeared disyllabic words including “维” and the situation of co-existing of monosyllabic words and disyllabic words lasted till the Republic of China. Now “维” as a word disappeared and only as a morpheme in disyllabic or multisyllabic words. The transformation from a monosyllabic word to a monosyllabic morpheme is a very common phenomenon in Chinese. Keywords “Wei”(维), syntactic evolvement, morphemization 1. Introduction The word “Wei”(维) is a very common morpheme in modern Chinese, but its evolution is of specialty which is worth exploring. In Chinese history, a morpheme has ever been a word which could be used independently, but in modern Chinese, many monosyllabic words lower their status to monosyllabic morphemes (Dong Xiufang, 2004). “维”was a word in ancient times, which is pictophonetic while its character from 糸(mì)and 隹(zhuī). “糸” means “rope, string”. The combination of “糸”and “隹” means ‘to draw forth more than three ropes from a higher place to the ground and enclose a hollow cone’. The original meaning is “rope” which is used to form a cone.