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Article published In:
Functions of Language
Vol. 26:2 (2019) ► pp.139–176

The development of the Chinese copula shì construction

A diachronic constructional perspective

| City University of Hong Kong
| Stanford University

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).

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The perspectives on grammar and change adopted
    • 2.1Construction grammar
    • 2.2Constructionalization
    • 2.3Comparison of constructionalization with grammaticalization
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.The development of the copula shì
    • 4.1The copula shì in Modern Chinese
    • 4.2The situation in Archaic Chinese
    • 4.3The emergence of the copula shì construction
    • 4.4Probable motivations and mechanisms for constructionalization of shì as a copula
  • 5.Expansion of the copula shì construction
    • 5.1The gain of the copula shì construction and reduction of the copula wéi construction
    • 5.2The increase of adverbs preceding shì
    • 5.3Generalization of the copula shì construction without final particle
    • 5.4Changes in the type of np in [np1 shì np2]
    • 5.5The intertwining of expansion and reduction
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.16001.zha
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