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Article published In: Studies in Language
Vol. 42:4 (2018) ► pp.886–922

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The constructionalization and constructional change of noncanonical V-NP expressions in Mandarin Chinese

 | Zhejiang Normal University
 | Zhejiang University
Published online: 4 February 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.17001.li
Abstract
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, Elizabeth C. & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), 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
References (52)
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