The Study on the Essential Properties of Verbs of “chop” in Chinese from a Diachronic Point of View

This paper analyzed the essential properties of the verbs of "chop" from a diachronic point of view. The verbs of "chop" was "砍(kan)"、"斩(zhan)"、"斫(zhuo)"、"伐(fa)". According to analysis, the verbs of "chop" had four semantic characteristics - ①(chop down trees), ②(behead/cut), ③(cut an object), ④ (passive semantics). "砍(kan)" had turned into the dominant word because it had all four semantic characteristics from the Ming Dynasty.This paper also described the formation of various disyllable compound words from monosyllabic verbs and their formation rules. Specifically, it is mentioned as follows. The author researched that how monosyllabic verb is developed to a compounded words composed of synonyms. In addition, researched the reason why the words for the concept of "Chop" often collocate with '倒(dao)', '断(duan)', '下(xia)', '落(luo)', '死(si)', '缺(que)'. and investigated the diachronic evolution of the sentence structure.Finally, This paper figured out the reason why the verbs of "chop" to be an ergative verb. And figured out the reason even though the verbs of "chop" is an ergative verb, why it is sometimes received the passive marker.