10 - Verb Copying and Reduplication

Summary

This chapter deals with two innovative devices, the verb-copying construction and verb reduplication. The verb-copying construction was innovated approximately 300 years ago and is a relatively young construction that did not have any equivalent before the fifteenth century AD. Unlike the disposal construction, which is marked by a grammatical morpheme bǎ, the verb-copying construction represented an abstract syntactic structure without any specific lexical marking. The reduplication of nouns emerged around the third century BC and was taken over by classifiers after the sixth century AD, while a number of classifiers grammaticalized out of ordinary nouns. However, the reduplication of verbs did not exist until the thirteenth century AD, more than two millennia later than the reduplication of adjectives and adverbs.