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Volume 24, Issue 3
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Abstract

Modern Chinese confirmative (as in (沒錯，我要毒死你) ‘that’s right. I really wanted to poison you to death’) is not an auxiliary but an adverb. It derives from the adjective ‘true, real’ in Old Chinese ( (偃之言也) ‘what Yan said was true’). The grammaticalization pathway of the Modern Chinese confirmative is different from that of the copula ( (老張貨車司機) ‘Laozhang is a truck driver’) or the auxiliary ( (老張開貨車，我開客車) ‘Laozhang drives a truck and I drive a coach car’). Modern Chinese confirmative , copula , and auxiliary have the same morphological form because they all appear to derive from the adjective or demonstrative ( (可忍，孰不可忍) ‘if this could be endured, is there anything else that could not be endured’) in Old Chinese. Such a pattern of morphological sameness seems to be cross-linguistically rare, if not unique.

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2018-02-09
2020-01-26

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Modern Chinese confirmative shi
Functions of Language 24, 294 (2017); https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.15018.lon
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