The original meaning of 望, a transitive verb, is look into the distance from a high place.Before Yuan Dynasty, 望 was generally a verb,foming a verb-object structure together with a positional word. It has been slowl...The original meaning of 望, a transitive verb, is look into the distance from a high place.Before Yuan Dynasty, 望 was generally a verb,foming a verb-object structure together with a positional word. It has been slowly grammaticalized since then,and the structure of “望+ positional word”has become one of prep-object, as an adverbial, modifying the verb followed.Those conditions of changing are: firstly, the appearance of positional words; secondly, the appearance of the structure of “望+ positional word +verb”.Since its eclipsing with往 on function in Yuan Dynasty, 往has swallowed望. In modern Chinese, 望 continues to be used as a preposition only in phonetic form.展开更多
文摘The original meaning of 望, a transitive verb, is look into the distance from a high place.Before Yuan Dynasty, 望 was generally a verb,foming a verb-object structure together with a positional word. It has been slowly grammaticalized since then,and the structure of “望+ positional word”has become one of prep-object, as an adverbial, modifying the verb followed.Those conditions of changing are: firstly, the appearance of positional words; secondly, the appearance of the structure of “望+ positional word +verb”.Since its eclipsing with往 on function in Yuan Dynasty, 往has swallowed望. In modern Chinese, 望 continues to be used as a preposition only in phonetic form.
