A Comparative Study on Unmarked Adjectival Predication and Boundedness in Modern Mandarin and Classic Chinese

Abstract

Conceptualization according to boundedness and unboundedness is a universal characteristic of human cognition. By a comparative analysis on unmarked adjectival predication in modern Mandarin and classic Chinese, this paper aims to investigate the boundedness of adjectival predication from a historical perspective. It is revealed that in classic Chinese unmarked adjectival-predicates were more complicated, and adjectives were able to function as predicates much more freely without the support of functional elements. It is also worth noting that the unmarked adjectival predication in modern Chinese are are actually boundarized at the context level from pragmatic perspective. In addition, corpus data and statistic analysis are also used to examine the changes of unmarked adjectival-predicates in different historical period. It can be clearly seen that the use of unmarked adjectival-predicates began to decline in the middle ancient times, then decreased continuously in Song and Yuan Dynasties, and become very restricted and rare in Ming and Qing Dynasties.