A Study on the Grammaticalization of Experience Aspect Guo₂

Abstract

The dynamic auxiliary ‘guo’ can be divided into ‘guo₁’ and ‘guo₂’. Experience aspect guo₂ appeared in Song, and most of them were in the Southern Song period work ZHU ZI YU LEI. The paper investigates the use of the word ‘guo₂’ from Song to Qing, and the combination type of word ‘guo₂’ is gradually rich in syntactic form, and the frequency of use of word ‘guo₂’ is constantly increasing. The grammatical path of ‘guo₂’ is from the verb ‘guo’ to the progressive complement ‘guo’, which implies both propensity and consequence, on the basis of the semantics of the progressive complement ‘guo’, in the Tang period, ‘guo₁’ derived from ‘guo’, which had the function of completing grammar. As the context of the use of ‘guo’ expanded, ‘guo₂’ was derived from ‘guo₁’. The evolution of ‘guo₂’ from ‘guo₁’ is the result of semantic and pragmatic drive. The pragmatic motivation stimulates the meaning of the events, the event meaning determines the event structure, the event structure determines the syntactic structure, and the change of the event significance also determines the change of the syntactic structure accordingly. Changes in event structure can affect the grammatical significance of imaginary words in syntactic structure. ‘guo₁’ is in the event before the sequential event, and ‘guo₂’ is in the experiential event, which is used to evaluate and explain another event. After evolving from ‘guo₁’ to ‘guo₂’, the grammatical meaning, word collocation, and cognitive viewpoint have all changed. The grammatical mechanism of ‘guo₂’ is reanalysis, metonymy, generalization, and contextual absorption.