The development of the Chinese copulashìconstruction

Abstract

AbstractThis paper investigates the development of the copulashìconstruction 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 expressionshì, rather than on its development in the context of both the immediate syntactic frame and also of other constructions such as the demonstrativeshìconstruction and the copulawéiconstruction. We show that the copulashìconstruction 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) andHaspelmath (2004).