The Evolutional Development of Nouns in Middle Chinese Grammar

Abstract

Middle Chinese witnessed the existence of a large number of new grammatical constituents, some of which had already been developed in the mid and late Old Chinese language before thriving in middle ancient times. Among these, the syntactic functions of nouns in Middle Chinese were in the process of evolutional development. The paper aims to investigate the nature of noun evolution by analyzing the exemplified data. It is found that nouns in Middle Chinese grammar mainly serve as subjects, objects, and attributes, though their direct link with predicates became less frequent due to the extensive usage of the copula of shì是 (be). The development of nouns mainly consisted of prefixes and suffixes, such as the prefix ā阿, which emerged with its crucial evolutional features.