Syntactic Change in Chinese: On Grammaticalization

The process of grammaticalization cannot furnish the causes of syntactic change; it does not explain why a reanalysis intervenes. However, it may tell us what are the mechanisms of the changes. This article presents four standard cases of grammaticalization of verbs into prepositions or particles; they concern (ⅰ) the disposal construction, (ⅱ) the comparative construction, (ⅲ) the dative construction and (ⅳ) the construction with a perfective aspectual particle. It is shown that in all these cases, grammaticalization of verbs into prepositions/particles intervenes in serial verb constructions of the type ”VI+NP1+V2 (+NP2)”, as it was assumed some fifteen years ago. Those who criticized this point of view, arguing that the verbs which were supposed to become prepositions were not employed in serial verb constuction, may not be right. The processes of grammaticalization studied in this paper are mechanisms of internal change which have created very frequently employed constructions. They can thus account for the appearance of new grammatical markers without necessitating the awkward explanation relying on the external borrowing from foreign languages, or that on the process of single lexical replacement, which may both have contributed to the appearance of new lexical items but probably have not much influenced grammatical system of the Chinese language.