The constructionalization and constructional change of noncanonical V-NP expressions in Mandarin
Chinese
This paper investigates the process of constructionalization and constructional change of apparently noncanonical
yet highly frequent V-NP expressions in Mandarin Chinese, which exist in other languages as well (e.g., Southeast Asian languages
and African languages). A corpus-based survey of 20 frequently used monosyllabic verbs shows that both the token and the type
frequency of the noncanonical V-NP expressions have on the whole been increasing throughout the history of the Chinese language.
From a constructional perspective, it is proposed that the noncanonical V-NP structure has gone through a process of grammatical
constructionalization and constructional change (
Traugott & Trousdale 2013), which
involves diachronic changes in productivity, schematicity and compositionality and which is manifested in the increasing number of
the semantic types of postverbal NPs.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Construction and constructionalization
- 3.Evolutionary properties of noncanonical V-NP construction
- 3.1High productivity
- 3.2High schematicity
- 3.3Low compositionality
- 4.Constructionalization and constructional change of noncanonical V-NP constructions and their expansion types
- 4.1Extension Type I
- 4.2Extension type II
- 4.3Extension type III
- 4.4Extension type IV
- 5.Diachronic evolution of the NPs in noncanonical V-NP construction
- 6.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Abbreviations
-
References
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