The Establishment Of Modern Chinese Grammar: The Formation Of The Resultative Construction And Its Effects (studies In Language Companion Series)

This book investigates historical motivations for the emergence of the resultative construction in Chinese from the following four aspects: (a) disyllabification, (b)adjacent context, (c) semantic integrity, and (d) frequency of co-occurence of a pair of verb and resultative. The author also addresses a series of grammatical changes and innovations caused by the formation of this resultative construction, such as the development of aspect, mood, verb reduplication, the new predicate structure, the disposal construction, the passive construction, the verb copying construction, and the new topicalization construction, all of which together shape the grammatical system of Modern Chinese. The present analysis raises and discusses a number of theoretical issues that are meaningful to various linguistic disciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and general historical linguistics. This volume investigates the formation of the resultative construction and its effect on the establishment of the grammar of Modern Chinese. The resultative construction is a syntactic pattern consisiting of a verb plus an adjective or an intransitive verb.