In this paper, the conceptual spaces of the diachronic semantic evolution of “gen” are constructed through the diachronic literature surveys, then the cross-dialect/language semantic maps are drawn as a tool to examine the rationality of the diachronic evolution. “Gen (跟)” is an action verb with the meaning of “following (跟隨)”, in Chinese history the dominant words with the semantic field of “following” have experienced the diachronic evolution of “cong (從)”, “sui (隨)” and “gen (跟)”. The development of these three words not only follows the law of parallel grammaticalization, but also each has its own feature. From the comparison diachronic and cross-dialect /language semantic map of the “following (跟隨)” meaning, it can be seen that, non-cognate words with family characteristics may also have the same semantic evolution. Some phenomena in the synchronic regional semantic maps that violate the “semantic map connectivity hypothesis”, may not be due to the complete lack of connection between the two nodes, but due to the choice of semantics of a specific symbolic form in the diachronic development.

• 莊卉潔(中央財經大學) | Huijie ZHUANG