A diachronic construction grammar account of the Chinese cause-complement pivotal construction

Abstract

This paper provides a construction-based account of the diachronic development of the cause-complement pivotal construction, a complex and schematic construction in Chinese. This construction, structurally hypotactic, originated from the embedded subordination construction before the 3rd century BC. It then further evolved in two dimensions: one is the increase in the the level of schematicity (stratification); the other is the increase of the extent of inclusiveness (inclusive growth), in which the new constructs deviating from the original restrictive conditions of this type of construction are sanctioned. The two dimensions cyclically interacted with each other, leading to the relaxation of the restrictive conditions of sanctioning new constructs. The relaxation of the restrictive conditions is accompanied by the semantic-pragmatic context expansion, which has been posited in the literature as the core defining feature of grammaticalization.