A Study on the Expression of Time in Chinese: Focusing on Time Words of the Type “Noun+shang/xia”

Abstract

Among the temporal words in Modern Chinese, there is a closed small class, namely, the temporal words in the pattern of “Noun+shang/xia”. After a diachronic investigation, this paper concludes that these words are the synchronic relics of different historical products, and their structure was fixed in the Qing Dynasty. There are two main reasons for the synchronic distribution pattern of these words: the metaphorical projection of the semantic features of directional words “shang” and “xia” during the process of disyllabic in Chinese, and the internal analogy within the language. The former is the main for the opposition between “Noun+shang” and “Noun+xia” within this class of temporal words, while the latter mainly affects the internal structure “Noun+shang” temporal words. Moreover, during the process of semantic feature projection, there is an asymmetry in the occurrence time of the basic core features and other semantic features of the directional words “shang” and “xia”, with the basic core semantic features occurring earlier and showing certain stubbornness in the of grammaticalization.