The Historical Morpho-Syntax of Chinese

This book provides a comprehensive history of the evolution of Chinese grammar over the past 3,000 years. Presenting the theoretical frameworks of grammaticalization, cognitive linguistics, and linguistic typology, it focuses on the motivations, mechanisms, and courses of the evolution of the Chinese morphology and syntax. The development of a language is similar to that of an organic body, with internal correlations between the emergences of new phenomena and the disappearances of old phenomena within in a particular period. The book explores all the major historical changes in depth, including word order changes, constructionalizations, replacement of old morphological markers with new ones, information-organizing principles, and newly formed grammatical devices. It also discusses the main motivations responsible for grammatical changes, such as phonological changes, the overall property change of the grammatical system, the frequency of co-occurrences of words and phrases, pragmatic contexts, and language contacts. The Chinese language, which has had the longest history and has been continuously documented, is the quintessence of the intelligence of human beings as a whole. As such, this comprehensive history of the Chinese language is meaningful in many ways—scholarly, culturally, and socially, and is a valuable resource for anyone interested in exploring the cognition of human.