The Ji Resultatives – A Semantic Study of the Aspect Marker from the Perspectives of Grammaticalization and Translation

Abstract

The focus of this research is on the semantic behaviors of the Chinese character 既 (ji) in Archaic Chinese (11^th century B.C. – 3^rd century B.C.). It demonstrates how the lexical and grammatical meanings of this character are captured by diachronical studies, sorted by contempoary grammaticalization thoeries, and made accessible to the English academic world with the aid of the monumental translation work of James Legge. It is found that ji in this period is mainly an aspectual marker of combined resultatives, which is the overlapping area of objective resultative and passive perfect, concerning the resultant state of a situation that has happened with regard to another situation or another time. The syntactic relations play an important role in decihpering the semantic subtleties of ji. With regard to Chinese/English translation studies, it is evident that translation of classic literary works, as part of the noble goals of intercultural communication for better human understanding, can often turn the dusty opaqucity in one language into clean transparency in the other language. This will help to build a bridge between the past and the present for contemporary readers of both languages to comprehend and appreciate the ancient language data in the light of contemporary linguistics.

Keywords

Grammaticalization / Archaic Chinese / Resultatives / Translation Studies / Ji (既)

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