Word-Order Change and Grammaticalization in the History of Chinese

📖 The Scoop

This work presents the results of recent research on two much discussed topics in Chinese linguistics: word-order change and grammaticalization. Chapter 1 describes the data on which the study is based. Chapter 2 discusses the history of Chinese word-order change of prepositional phrases and takes issue with the division of syntactic changes into two types, grammatical and non-grammatical. Chapter 3 examines the history of the BA construction and demonstrates that the putative object-verb word order associated with the linguistic sign BA is not new but simply replaces an older construction. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the way in which two other linguistic signs, LE and DE in Modern Mandarin, became grammaticalized. Chapter 6 argues that all the syntactic changes under study were related to reanalyses motivated by similarities of linguistic elements in a given paradigm.

Genre: Foreign Language Study / Chinese (fancy, right?)