
Full text loading...
This paper takes the string e5 khuan2 个款 (EK for short) as an ambiguous case to show the emergence of a grammatical function out of a lexical category. It examines the ambiguity of EK in conjunction with the analysis of its syntactic structure. It explores the collocates of EK including a range of matrix predicates and sentence-final particles. It pins down EK as a sensory evidential marker in semantic interpretation. Finally, it teases out the unique syntactic and semantic properties of EK in terms of the layered structure of sentence-final particles.