‘有+人+VP’ 구조의 변천과 언어사적 의의

초록

This study investigates, from a diachronic perspective, the formation and evolution of the structures “you ren” (“有人”) and “you yi ren” (“有一人”) within the pivotal construction of the form “you + ren + VP”. In this structure, the animate noun “ren” (人, “person”) serves simultaneously as the object of “you” and the subject of the verb phrase, conveying indefinite information. These two constructions emerged in the middle stage of Early Classical Chinese and underwent significant changes through the Middle Chinese period, including a semantic bleaching of “you” from “existence” to “appearance”, and a differentiation between the indefiniteness of “ren” and the specificity of “yi ren”. In the Modern Chinese period, “you ren” became lexicalized and began to appear frequently at the sentence-initial position, while “you yi ren” was gradually replaced by “you yi ge ren” (“有一个人”). In Contemporary Chinese, “you ren” no longer functions as a pivotal construction, whereas “you yi ren” still retains this grammatical function. This paper demonstrates that “you ren” and “you yi (ge) ren” have developed into structurally and semantically distinct constructions in Chinese, which constitutes the main significance of the study.

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