A Case Study on the Grammaticalization of GUO in Mandarin Chinese-Polysemy of the Motion Verb with Respect to Semantic Changes

This paper investigates the grammaticalization paths of the motion verb GUO in Mandarin Chinese based on synchronic corpus data. The Mandarin morpheme GUO is shown to have undergone numerous semantic shifts: the spatial GUO through the operation of The Moving Ego Metaphor and The Moving Time Metaphor is initially mapped onto the target domain of temporality. With metaphoric or metonymic extension and pragmatic enrichment, GUO, which originally means ‘physical passing through space,’ arrives at its new senses of ‘to go beyond a certain norm,’ ‘excessively,’ and ‘a mistake.’ Further separate developments have led to the use of GUO such as that found in the concessive adverb Bu-GUO, and to its use as an experiential aspect marker. In these evolutional processes, GUO has changed from a basic motion verb to a highly polysemous word, and provides the language with an enriched set of concepts that signify various abstract functions related to path, direction, time flow, norm, and temporal experience.