The formation of the resultative construction and its effects on the establishment of modern Chinese grammar.

摘要

This dissertation investigates the formation of the resultative construction in the history of Chinese and its profound effects on the morphology and syntax of Chinese. The resultative construction is a syntactic pattern consisting of a verb plus an adjective/intransitive verb. Its two elements typically represent a disyllabic unit, stand in an “action-result” relationship, and form a single syntactic constituent. Many important grammatical changes, which contributed to the establishment of Modern Chinese grammar, reached the completion of their development or were newly introduced into the language within the period of time from AD 1,000–AD 1,500. I hypothesize that all of these changes, far being from accidental, are direct or indirect consequences of the emergence of the resultative construction. The development of the resultative construction influences the grammar of Chinese in two major respects. First, some resultatives, typically those with semantic generality and high relevance to verbs, underwent further grammaticalization into verbal affixes or clitics. Second, due to the fusion of verb and resultative, the patient arguments of the verb which originally appeared between the verb and the resultative had to appear elsewhere, which triggered the innovation of many constructions. The present research mainly focuses on the factors enabling the formation of the resultative construction—the disyllabification tendency, frequency of collocation, adjacent occurrence, and semantic relevance. The present analysis is a grammaticalization approach for the establishment of Modern Chinese grammar.; This analysis raises a number of important theoretical issues that are discussed in detail. Phonological change can have a profound effect on the texture of morphology and syntax of a language through favoring or disfavoring certain pathways of grammaticalization. The accumulation of idiomatized or lexicalized items can lead to the innovation of syntactic patterns. The first appearance and expansion of a new grammatical form can be lexically governed. The status of a linguistic form often changes during the transition from an old to a new form, which can explain why a new grammatical form which conflicts with an existing rule can come into being. The frequency of collocation and semantic relevance serve as enabling factors for the morphophonological fusion of two constituents. Any grammar is a system and changes typically cluster. Reanalysis is preconditioned and analogy operates in different fashions throughout a grammaticalization process.