Emergence,Origin,and Development of the Modal Particle"Shi"at the End of Modern Chinese Sentences
The phenomenon that judgment words located at the end of a sentence and evolved into modal particles is more common in Sino-Tibetan languages,which represents a new direction of grammaticalization of judgment words and reflects a subjective process of increasing subjectivity and an interactive subjectivity containing a typological value.This paper summarizes the usage of the modal particle"Shi"at the end of a sentence in modern Chinese dialect,and based on diachronic investigation,probes into the usage and grammaticalization path of the modal particle"Shi"at the end of sentences in modern Chinese.It is shown that the modal particle"Shi"at the end of sentences roughly came into being in the Tang and Song dynasties,and mainly experienced the evolution of the anaphora pronoun"Shi"in the post-judgment sentence.After"Shi"has become the only grammatical mark of a judgment sentence,it has completely replaced the function of"Ye".In addition to developing the usage of focus mark,emphasis mark,and contrast mark,the use of modal particles has also developed in the syntactic structure of"NP+VP+(other)+Shi".Finally,this paper extends the research perspective to the whole Sino-Tibetan language family,combined with many examples of the grammatical transformation of"Shi"into modal particles at the end of Sino-Tibetan sentences to explore its typological value.
modern Chinesemodal particle at the end of sentencesgrammaticalizationtypological value
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