Evolution of "Boshi":From Perspective of Historical Pragmatics
The Chinese word boshi has undergone incessant evolution since its origin in the Warring States period more than two thousand years ago.In the modern times,the degree system was adopted from the West;hence the word is used to refer to doctor,the highest university degree.Nevertheless,some new meanings are incessantly derived due to the influence of pragmatic inferenc and language users' cognitive processing.The evolution of boshi and the motives for and the mechanism of its pragmatic development are investigated.It is argued that this process is motivated by iconicity,social cultural influences,language acquisition and strategic interaction between communicators,and that analogy,abduction,borrowing as well as the fossilization and vanishing of some contextual meanings are either separately or integratively involved as its mechanisms.