“然后”一词在现代汉语口语中使用范围的扩大及其机制

On Extension of the Word "Ranhou" in Modern Spoken Chinese and its Mechanism

本文先列举“然后”一词在古代汉语篇章中的传统用法,又通过问卷调查和语料分析详细阐述“然后”的使用范围在现代汉语口语中扩大了,出现了明显的语法化趋势。该词可以表达添加、因果、时空等连接关系,同时也可以用做语篇中的话题转换标记。它还引领一个“话题转换标记———主语(第二人称)———表示心理过程的动词———语气助词(吗)”的句法结构。“然后”一词已经成为语篇中保持信息流动的一个重要手段。文章最后探讨了“然后”语法化的动因。

This paper first presents the traditional use of the word “ranhou” in ancient Chinese texts and then elaborates the fact that its usage is being extended and it is being grammaticalized in modern spoken Chinese by making a questionnaire investigation and corpus analysis. It can be concluded that “ranhou” can be used to express the additive, causal, and temporal conjunctive relationships, and it can also be used as a topic shift marker in discourse. The word also starts a syntactic structure “ranhou-subject （ni）-Vm-auxiliary （ma）”.“Ranhou” has become an important means that keeps the flow of information in discourse. Three hypotheses about the mechanism of grammaticalization of “ranhou” are put forward in this paper.