The Evolution of Chinese Grammar

A study of the motivations, mechanisms and regularities in the evolutionary history of Chinese grammar over the past three millennia.

Yuzhi Shi (Author)

9781108844055, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 March 2023

500 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 3.7 cm, 1.07 kg

The Chinese language has the longest well-documented history among all human languages, making it an invaluable resource for studying how languages develop and change through time. Based on a twenty-year long research project, this pioneering book is the English version of an award-winning study originally published in Chinese. It provides an evolutionary perspective on the history of Chinese grammar, tracing its development from its thirteenth-Century BC origins to the present day. It investigates all the major changes in the history of the language within contemporary linguistic frameworks, and illustrates these with a wide range of examples taken from every stage in the language's development, showing how the author's findings are relevant to contemporary descriptive, theoretical, and historical linguistics. Shedding light on the essential properties of Chinese and, ultimately, language in general, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students of Asian linguistics, historical linguistics and syntactic theory.

Conventions used in the examples
Abbreviations and symbols
1. Some preliminaries
2. Copular word and construction
3. Focus and wh-word
4. Serial verb construction
5. Disyllabification
6. Resultative construction
7. Information structure
8. Passive construction
9. Disposal construction
10. Verb copying and reduplication
11. Comparative construction
12. Ditransitive construction
Aspect and tense
14. Negotiation
15. Boundedness of predicate
16. Classifier
17. Demonstratives from classifiers
18. Distal demonstratives from phonological derivation
19. Pronouns, plurals and diminutives
20. Structural particles
21. Word order and relative clause
22. Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK], Language: history & general works [CBX]