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The grammaticalization of the particle le in Mandarin Chinese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Ziqiang Shi
Ziqiang Shi
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College
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Abstract

This article investigates the grammaticalization process of liao as a main verb in 10th-century vernacular texts to le as an aspectual particle in modern Chinese. I propose that two processes are involved. First, with the “resultative construction” coming into existence in the language, some instances of liao were reanalyzed as the phase complement of the new morphological construction. Second, other instances of the verb began to lose their verbness by taking sentential subjects and occurring in temporal clauses only. These processes gave rise to the positional change of liao from after the complement of the verb to before the complement of the verb of le.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 1989 , pp. 99 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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