身体姿势动作与状态表达的历时演变

Historical Changes in the Semantic Expression of Posture Verbs

表示身体姿势的动词,比如“坐”“站”“躺”,在词汇语义上既包含动态也包含静态。姿势的产生是一个动作,而姿势产生之后就形成一种可以持续的状态。在上古汉语中,姿势动词的动作义和状态义在形式上没有特别的标志,可以用相同的词汇形式来表达,主要借助语境来区分。到了近代汉语之后,姿势动作可以通过在动词后附加趋向词来表达,姿势状态可以通过在动词后附加体标记“着”来表达。动作义和状态义的表达有了一定的形式区分,但仍存在一些需要借助语境来区分两种含义的情况。在上古汉语中,姿势动词普遍存在致使义项,而到了现代汉语中,通过姿势动词自身表达致使义的现象走向衰落甚至消失,主要依靠致使句式来表达致使义。

This paper deals with the historical changes of posture verbs“sit”“stand”“lie”in Chinese.The semantics of posture verbs include two profiles:activity and state.In Old Chinese,the same verb can express activity and state without any changes in form.To distinguish the activity meaning and the state meaning,the context information is needed.From Pre-Modern Chinese,the activity meaning of posture verbs can be expressed through the directional particles after the verb,and the state meaning can be expressed through the aspect marker“zhe”(着)following the verb.However,there are still some situations in which the two kinds of meanings should be distinguished through context information.In Old Chinese,posture verbs had causative meanings,but in Modern Chinese,the causative usages are disappearing.To express causation,syntactic constructions are used.