CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online.

The establishment of the classifier system and the grammaticalization of the morphosyntactic particle de in Chinese Export

Language Sciences, Vol. 24, No. 1. (January 2002), pp. 1-15.

Citation Format

[Posts]

View FullText article


tonytrifles's tags for this article

chinese classifiers linguistics

X Reviews [Write a review of this article]

X Find related articles from these CiteULike users

X Find related articles with these CiteULike tags

X Posting History

X Abstract

This paper analyzes the causal relationship between the establishment of the classifier system and the grammaticalization of the morphosyntactic particle de in the history of Chinese. By doing so, we try to answer a question relevant to grammaticalization theory: why should lexical items which are equally suitable for certain grammatical domain develop into morphological markers for that grammatical domain with different functions? We argue that grammaticalization is subject to the influence of the overall structural change of a language in a particular period of time. A language at different times may possess different optimal structures which serve the model triggering grammaticalization via analogy. An optimal structure shapes the path and degree of grammaticalization. Consequently, the grammatical markers innovated at different times for the same grammatical domain may behave differently.


X BibTeX record

X RIS record


Privacy Statement | Terms & Conditions
CiteULike organises scholarly (or academic) papers or literature and provides bibliographic (which means it makes bibliographies) for universities and higher education establishments. It helps undergraduates and postgraduates. People studying for PhDs or in postdoctoral (postdoc) positions. The service is similar in scope to EndNote or RefWorks or any other reference manager like BibTeX, but it is a social bookmarking service for scientists and humanities researchers.