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Abstract

Abstract

This paper investigates the development of the copula construction in Chinese from the perspective of diachronic construction grammar (Traugott & Trousdale 2013). In prior work the development has been conceptualized in a grammaticalization framework, with focus on the individual expression , rather than on its development in the context of both the immediate syntactic frame and also of other constructions such as the demonstrative construction and the copula construction. We show that the copula construction went through various types of expansion and reduction. The change was not unidirectional in the way predicted by a grammaticalization model such as is proposed in e.g. Lehmann (19952004) and Haspelmath (2004).

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The development of the Chinese copula shì construction
Functions of Language 26, 139 (2019); https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.16001.zha
/content/journals/10.1075/fol.16001.zha
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