从上古汉语一批代词形式的消失看汉语量化表达的变化

Changes of Quantification in Chinese: From the Perspective of the Loss of Some Quantificational Pronouns in Old Chinese

古代汉语中有一批代词形式(包括否定性代词、无定代词等)后来消失了,如“莫、靡、罔、或”等,这些代词都与量化表达有关。后来这些代词所表达的语义都要通过动词短语(“动词+名词性成分”,其中动词用“没有”或“有”)或限定词短语(“限定词+名词性成分”,其中限定词用“有的”或“有些”)来表达,即通过分析性的句法形式来表达。这些代词形式的消失,反映了汉语的量化表达从以单语素的量化代词为主到量化算子和描述性内容分立表达的变化过程,是汉语从综合到分析演变大趋势的一种表现。

A range of quantificational pronouns in Old Chinese systematically disappeared in later stages of Chinese.They can be divided into two groups:i)negative pronouns which express the negation of existence,including mo(莫),mi(靡),wu(无),wang(罔),wu(毋)and wang(亡);ii)indefinite pronouns which express existential meaning,including huo(或)and you(有).These two groups of pronouns have been replaced by verbal phrases(V+NP,in which V is meiyou(没有)or you)as well as determiner phrases(Det+NP,in which Det is youde(有的)or youxie(有些)).Our proposal is that the loss of quantificational pronouns in the history of Chinese indicates the transition from synthesis(mono-morphemic forms)to analysis(separation of operators and descriptive contents)in the domain of existential quantification(pace Huang 2015 s Analyticity Parameter).Four distributional/interpretational properties of the quantificational pronouns in Old Chinese have been revealed:i)frequent co-occurrence with sentence-initial topics interpreted as background set of quantification;ii)regular occurrence in preverbal position,no matter whether agent reading or patient reading is triggered;iii)agent reading as the dominant case;iv)non-occurrence of huo in negative sentences.The diachronic change shows up in the following patterns:i)mo and other negative pronouns are replaced by the verb meiyou plus ren(人),shenme(什么)or a nominal with descriptive content;ii)the use of huo with pure existential reading is replaced by the verb you plus ren,shenme or a nominal with descriptive content,while partitive huo is replaced by a partitive determiner youde or youxie plus a nominal.The above diachronic changes,according to our textual investigation,happened during the period between the Six Dynasties and late Tang Dynasty,along with the development of you-quantification for bare nominal indefinites and“one+classifier+nominal”indefinites(Dong 2010).For a deeper explanation of this diachronic change,we adopt the Operator Merger Parameter proposed in Tsai(1999a,1999b,2008),who summarizes three strategies of quantification in natural languages:i)merge operators to IP or VP(eg,Chinese);ii)merge operators to PP or DP(eg,Japanese);iii)merge operators to D 0(eg,English).With the above facts in hand,we can conclude that the strategy for existential quantification throughout the history of Chinese changes from operators merging to D 0,i.e.,the English pattern(even more radical for Old Chinese,given that the operator and the variable form one single morpheme),to operators merging in VP(you/meiyou+NP)or merging in D 0 with the descriptive content independently encoded as NP(youde/youxie+NP).This analysis is much in line with Huang s(2015)proposal of Analyticity Parameter that Chinese went from a considerably synthetic language to an analytic language.