古漢語指示性句末助詞歷時研究

The study looks into the functions of Ancient Chinese er()as a clause-final particle, and delves into its development from Old Chinese to Early Modern Chinese. In the Western Zhou period, the character er() was first borrowed to write the predicative demonstrative meaning “so.” Later on, approximately during the transition from the Spring and Autumn period to the Warring States period, the distinction between er() and er() became blurred clause-finally in such dialects as Qi and Lu. As clause-final grammatical markers, er() and er() were apt to experience phonetic weakening; we believe it is through this process that er() and er() gradually had their contrasts neutralized and thus converged. Up to Middle Chinese, er() and er() were confined to predicative and clause-final positions respectively. Early Modern Zen analects brought in a seemingly newly coined word, ni(), but judging from its phonetic, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic resemblance to Middle Chinese er() and its capability of standing alone as a clause, this study argues that predicative ni() indeed evolved from er(). On the other hand, clause-final ni() evolved from er(), and its further development into Modern Mandarin ne() has been well documented. Clause-final ni() was borrowed into the Southern Min dialect no later than the Ming period. Clause-final ni() was written as “” in Ming-Qing Southern Min playscripts and as “” in the Yuyuan, a linguistics magazine published in Taiwan under Japanese rule. Nih8() is still in use, and its attestation is most frequent in southern Taiwan. The second part of the study is then devoted to the developments of ni5() as attested in Southern Min playscripts and of nih0() as attested in the Yuyuan. On this basis we go on to carry out fieldwork on the usage of nih8() in Tainan. Synchronically speaking, nih8() is nothing like a clause-typer, but rather occurs in all types of clauses creating an effect of exaggeration or emphasis; this attention-grabbing function of nih8() is arguably inherited from its demonstrative ancestor er(), roughly translatable as “like this.” Diachronically speaking, about a century ago, the rise of the utterance particle leh4() left in its wake the gradual confinement of nih8() to interrogative clauses; nowadays, in addition to marking indicatives and imperatives, leh4() extends to marking wh-questions, while nih8() is further restricted to yes-no questions, especially to rhetorical questions which are intended to make negative assertions provocatively.