汉语的若干显赫范畴:语言库藏类型学视角

Some Mighty Categories in Chinese: A perspective of Linguistic Inventory Typology

本文以语言库藏类型学为框架,探讨现代汉语普通话及部分方言中的若干显赫范畴。首先给出了显赫范畴的定义及其5个关键点,然后据此考察汉语的显赫范畴。本文通过句法论证和跨语言比较,说明词类中的动词、量词,短语中的连动结构,复句中的主次复句,由语用成分语法化而来的话题结构等语类都可以归入汉语的显赫范畴。通过分析这些范畴的用法可以发现,显赫范畴不但本身语法化程度高、句法功能强、使用频率高,而且有一个共同的特点:它们除了用于该范畴本身的原型功能之外,都被用来表达其他相邻的甚至有一定距离的语义语用范畴,即扩展范畴或边缘范畴,这些扩展或边缘范畴在很多其他语言里甚至大部分语言里是由属于其他范畴的语法手段来表达的。

This paper aims to illustrate the notion of ＇ mighty category＇ within the framework of linguistic inventory typology through a number of case studies in the common speech and some dialects of Chinese. A definition of ＇ mighty category＇ and five elaborative notes on the definition are offered. With syntactic analyses and cross-linguistic comparisons, several categories are thenidentified as mighty categories in Chinese at various levels, e.g. verbs and numeral classifiers at the part of speech level, serial verb constructions at the phrasal structure level, co-subordinate clauses at the complex sentence level, and topic structures at the grammaticalized pragmatic ele- ment level. Mighty categories are of stronger grammatical function and of greater frequency in use. Not only can they be employed according to their very prototypical functions, but they can also expand their semantic domains so as to convey neighboring or even quite remote categorical meanings which might otherwise be encoded by grammatical means for totally different categories in many or most other languages.