The Semantics Evolution and Pedagogical Grammar Analysis of the Chinese Adverb “Jiu”

• Main Authors: Weng, Yu-Chu, 翁玉珠
• Other Authors: Fang, Li-Na
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/65782100751916031703

碩士 === 中國文化大學 === 華語文教學碩士學位學程 === 104 === The purpose of this research is to explore the evolution of the meaning of the modern Chinese character ‘jiu4’ and its design within the framework of pedagogical grammar. First of all, this research looks at earliest possible reasons for creating the word and describes the origin of the character. Then this research discusses its symbolism and extended meaning. An analysis follows, from a historical perspective, of the information contained in the Academia Sinica’s Early Ancient Chinese, Middle Ancient Chinese and contemporary Chinese part-of-speech tagging corpus’ so as to conduct a comprehensive survey and analysis of the meaning of the word ‘jiu’ as represented in those historical periods. Furthermore a survey on the analyses of ‘jiu’ in semantics, adverbial uses and other expressions in modern Chinese using language data from the ‘Academic Sinica’s Modern Chinese language balanced database’ was also conducted. After a thorough literature review, compilation and statistical analysis, the following conclusions were reached: (1) In Chinese, although ‘jiu’ was used mainly as a verb in the Middle Ages, in the latter part of that period, the use of ‘jiu’ as a connective started to appear. Apart of using it as a verb during that period, it also started to be used as an adverbial connective. In contemporary time, it gradually started to be used as a function word and there were dramatic changes in the use of ‘jiu’ as a connective and a verb. In the modern era apart from using it as an adverb, there were also instances of it being used as a ‘preposition’. (2) The use of ‘jiu’ as an adverbial is usually in situations connected with the mood, time, level/number and scope of the sentence. The most frequent word which contains ‘jiu’ on the right of another character is ‘jiu4shi4’; the most frequent word which contains ‘jiu’ on the left of another character is ‘wo3jiu4’. (3) In the ‘New edition of the Practical Audio Visual Chinese’ textbook, the functions of sentence patterns containing the adverb ‘jiu’ follows the following sequence: connection 37.84%, mood 27.03%, time 21.62%, number/level 8.11%, scope 5.40%. In addition, the highest frequency of the word with ‘jiu’ appearing on the right of the word is ‘jiu4shi4’ and on the left is ‘wo3men0jiu4’. The teaching and learning of adverbs in Chinese is not easy, if teachers can start to understand the evolution and development of the word ‘jiu’, they can then guide learners how to grasp the different uses of ‘jiu’. This way it is possible to use different situations to properly use and express the uses of ‘jiu’.