Grammaticalization of Transfer Verbs in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

In Mandarin Chinese, historical changes in serial verb constructions have played an important role in the development of grammaticalization. In traditional analyses, few studies have been conducted to investigate connections between the lexical use and grammatical use of a given item (Yin, 2004). The case/voice markers in Mandarin have not been systematically investigated. This study seeks to fill these gaps and systematically investigates grammaticalization of typical Mandarin case/voice markers. The results of the study show that typical case/voice markers in Mandarin have been derived from transfer verbs and that the grammaticalization of Mandarin transfer verbs is not totally random, but motivated. Transfer verbs typically reflect human interactions and manipulations with physical objects, and thus, they can be good candidates to be utilized to indicate interactive relations. It is argued that employing transfer verbs as case/voice markers is motivated by the concepts of motion and transitivity as well (Yin, 2004). The paper demonstrates that in grammaticalization the semantics of lexical items is bleached; however, traces of their original meanings are retained. The study indicates that grammaticalization is a matter of degree and that case/voice markers developed from Mandarin transfer verbs display a continuum along the path of grammaticalization.