ABSTRACT

In the early 1980s, when the study of grammaticalization began its revival, the study of a parallel subject, that of semantic change, also began attracting researchers’ attention (e.g. Sweetser 1990; Heine et al. 1991; Bybee et al. 1994; Traugott and Dasher 2002; Hopper and Traugott 2003; Eckardt 2006). As a result, we have gained a much better understanding of several key elements of semantic change, such as its nature, its cause, and its mechanisms, as well as its role and its relationship to grammaticalization and other (e.g. syntactic) levels of linguistic change. It appears that Western researchers are generally in agreement that the nature and the cause of semantic change are pragmatic and communicative-based. Of the mechanisms of semantic change, only two – metaphoricalization and metonymization – have been developed and popularized. Alas, these studies have focused predominantly on IndoEuropean languages; there is a general lack of comprehensive research on semantic change in genetically unrelated and typologically different languages such as Chinese. As a result, it is unclear, especially to the Western linguistic community, whether the general tendencies of semantic change found in Indo-European languages apply also to Chinese.