THE NUMERAL 一/YI (ONE) IN CHINESE AND ITS TEMPORAL MEANINGS

Abstract

This paper is a corpus-based study of the semantic and grammatical meanings of the numeral 一/YI (one) in the construction „YI + VP”. Unlike previous research on YI, which has not always taken linguistic context into account, the conclusions presented here are based on our study of Chinese textual discourse, using corpus data, namely, eight modern and contemporary short stories by famous Chinese writers. The paper reveals the temporal meanings of  the adverbial YI in different language forms, which is a rare linguistic phenomenon in which a numeral in the capacity of a function word expresses the meaning of the temporal category.

The paper consists of the Introduction and four sections. The Introduction presents the fact that from the moment they were created, symbols for numerals in the Chinese language have more functions than just that of denoting quantity. Since YI is the first of all numbers and the first radical of Chinese characters, it takes on the philosophical meaning of „the Beginning of all beginnings” or „the Origin of all creations”. YI is worshipped and mystified in the Chinese cultural matrix, which is why it has the most complex meanings and the most variable usage among numerals, and it is the second among the three thousand most commonly used Chinese characters. All these are the driving factors behind the process of its grammaticalization.

In Section one, we try to give an overview of the evolution of the meanings and functions of the symbol „一/YI” in classical and contemporary Chinese based on ancient texts and previous research. In other words, we try to show how YI, originally a numeral, gets to be used as a noun, verb and adjective, and how then it can denote the meaning of a temporal category as a function word. We also note that due to the complex process of grammaticalization, YI expresses various grammatical meanings in different linguistic forms.

Section two summarizes previous research on this topic. In general, opinions are divided on whether the adverbial YI expresses the grammatical meaning of the tense, e.g. „instantaneous perfect” (瞬时过去时. Jahontov, 1958) or the meaning of the verb aspect, e.g. „instancy aspect”, (瞬时体. Chen, 2003), and „inceptive aspect” (起点体. Yin, 1999). In most previous research, the adverbial YI is discussed from the perspective of the relationship between two actions represented by a dependent clause and a main clause within a complex sentence. There are few authors, such as Chen and Wang (2006), who comprehensively study the grammatical meanings of the adverbial YI, putting it in different linguistic contexts. They argue that YI has a perfective use when the construction „YI + VP” occurs in the closing sentence of a text span, and that it marks the perfect tense in a sentence that does not end the whole statement. However, we do not fully agree with this view.

Section three is the main part of our research, which contains three subsections. The first gives a detailed description of the corpus of our analysis and examines the distribution of the construction  „YI + VP” in the corpus. According to the quantitative analysis, it is confirmed that among the 5423 predicate clauses in the corpus, only 96 predicates are formed by „YI + VP”, which accounts for 6.5% of the clauses with aspect markers (1476). These data show that the distribution of the adverbial YI in narrative texts is significantly lower than that of the perfective marker LE (which accounts for 53.8% of those with aspect markers). Moreover, the construction „YI + VP” forms the predicate in a dependent clause of a complex sentence in 83.3% of the cases, and the predicate of the independent clause only in 16.7% of the cases, which shows a strong tendency for the adverbial YI to occur in the subordinate clause, that is, in the form „YI + P1, P2”. Therefore, we can assume that this use of the adverbial YI is its basic function in contemporary Chinese, and that the semantic (in)dependence of the construction „YI + VP” is not directly related to whether the sentence is the closing one in a text span or not.  The second subsection examines the grammatical meaning of YI in the dependent clause in the polypredicative complex „YI + P1, P2”. Using the empirical approach, three types of logical meanings are discussed. It is also confirmed that the basic function of the adverbial YI in this linguistic form is to denote the taxis of anteriority, both narrowly and broadly. In „YI + P1, P2” with temporal meaning, YI then indicates contact anteriority or simultaneity, which distinguishes it from the marker LE. The third subsection examines the grammatical function of the adverbial YI in the predicate of a semantically independent clause and confirms that YI with its quantitative meaning performs a semantic modification of verbs, changing their aktionsart. In particular, when YI precedes an activity verb, it highlights one moment (minimal segment) of that atelic verb process, expressing the brevity of a particular action; if semelfactive verb is used, YI indicates that the action was performed only once; if it is a state verb, YI indicates the starting point of the state that this verb describes. Since resultative verbs or resultative verb compounds highlight only the end point of the situation, they do not require semantic modification to emphasize a particular moment of the verb process. Thus, the independent construction „YI + gl.” imposes a kind of semantic restriction on verbs, the likes of which the polypredicative complex „YI + P1, P2” does not have.

Fourth section is the Conclusion, that summarizes the conclusions of this research. In addition, the meanings of the adverbial YI and its status in the system of aspectuality in contemporary Chinese are determined once again by comparing it with its translation equivalents in Serbian.