| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 跨文化研究所語言學碩士班 === 103 === This thesis investigates the grammaticalization process and various uses of gei in Mandarin Chinese by Generative Grammar. By analyzing syntactic behaviors and semantic meanings of gei sentences, we classify gei into three kinds of uses: verbal uses, prepositional uses (including preverbal and postverbal uses) and particle uses. According to our analysis, we suggest that gei in Mandarin Chinese has undergone categorail change and that categorail change must be traceable. The grammatical process of gei is from ditransitive verbal uses, which means ‘to give something to somebody’, to prepositional uses, which can introduce abstract goals or express passive or imperative meaning, and then become particle uses, which can be used to emphasize the result or propose and is optinal. This semantic extension of gei in Mandarin Chinese also comforms to the semantic development rule: from concrete meaning to abstract meaning.
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