Description
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.
Table of Contents
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.
