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1 results

  • 9 - The Disposal Construction

  • Yuzhi Shi, National University of Singapore
  • Book:
    The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
    Published online:
    16 March 2023
    Print publication:
    23 March 2023, pp 203-245

  • Summary

    This chapter demonstrates that because of the fusion of the verb and the resultative via reanalysis, the syntactic position for a patient noun between them was eliminated so that the originally intervening patient noun needed to be rearranged somewhere in the sentence on the basis of the following principle: the patient noun was introduced in preverbal position by the disposal marker if it was definite, and was introduced by the first verb of the verb-copying construction if it was indefinite. This issue is related to the motivations for the emergence of the verb-copying construction and the unmarked SOV structure, all of which were entirely innovative in Modern Chinese.