The grammaticalization of the particlelein Mandarin Chinese

ABSTRACT This article investigates the grammaticalization process ofliaoas a main verb in 10th-century vernacular texts toleas an aspectual particle in modern Chinese. I propose that two processes are involved. First, with the “resultative construction” coming into existence in the language, some instances ofliaowere reanalyzed as the phase complement of the new morphological construction. Second, other instances of the verb began to lose their verbness by taking sentential subjects and occurring in temporal clauses only. These processes gave rise to the positional change ofliaofrom after the complement of the verb to before the complement of the verb ofle.