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The development of the Chinese copula shi construction: A diachronic constructional perspective
Author(s)
Date Issued
2019
Journal
ISSN
0929-998X
1569-9765
Citation
Functions of Language, Aug. 2019, vol. 26(2), pp. 139-176.
Type
Peer Reviewed Journal Article
Abstract
This paper investigates the development of the copula shì construction in Chinese from the perspective of diachronic construction grammar (Traugott & Trousdale 2013). In prior work the development has been conceptualized in a grammaticalization framework, with focus on the individual expression shì, rather than on its development in the context of both the immediate syntactic frame and also of other constructions such as the demonstrative shì construction and the copula wéi construction. We show that the copula shì construction went through various types of expansion and reduction. The change was not unidirectional in the way predicted by a grammaticalization model such as is proposed in e.g. Lehmann (1995, 2004) and Haspelmath (2004).
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