On the Evolvement of Contextual Variant form in Domba Writing
DENG Zhang-ying, BAI Xiao-li
(The Research Institute of Chinese Language and Document ,South West university, Chongqing, 400715)
According to the word meaning category recorded by contextual variant form of a character, there are several circumstances: agent plus action; agent plus action plus patient; action plus patient; action plus place; instrument plus action. The common feature of these structures is composed of the common central semantic and the additional meaning, the common central semantic keeps unchangeableness, the additional meaning will change with different contexts. With the accuracy development of the character recording words, the additional meaning will be fixed to be loose, and come off at last. With the exactitude of recording expressions within writing, these structures gradually evolve into combination of characters. During this process, resulting from the different degrees of differentiations, three differentiations may appear: no differentiations, differentiations in the progress, differentiations finished. Correspondingly, the evolvement of writing characters probably comprises of three phases: the exclusive use of writing character, the currency use of writing characters and the uniform writing characters.
