古漢語言說動詞「道」的語法化和詞彙化

By examining the formation of “X-dao 道” on a case-by-case basis, this paper offers a diachronic overview of the grammaticalization and lexicalization of the saying verb dao. The increasing abstraction of dao’s semantic content enabled the cognition verb dao to grammaticalize rapidly in the phrasal construction “V-dao”, and the compound word template “X-dao” also began to appear. These two trends played decisive roles in dao’s development from the Early Modern period onward. Compared to other saying verbs in Chinese, dao was especially prone to lexicalization. As dao grammaticalized into a clitic-like complementizer, more and more tokens of “V-dao” were being lexicalized. In addition, as conjunctions and adverbs were increasingly compounded with dao to form compound units, the clitic-like dao began to thrive through reanalysis. As an isolating language, Chinese may lack typical inflectional affixes, but morphemes which are not completely morphologicalized still exist in Chinese. Dao, cliticized to either words or phrases, is one such example.