Book contents
- The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
- The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Conventions Used in the Examples
- Abbreviations and Symbols
- 1 Some Preliminaries
- 2 Copular Word and Construction
- 3 Focus and Wh- Words
- 4 Serial Verb Construction
- 5 Disyllabification
- 6 Resultative Construction
- 7 Information Structure
- 8 The Passive Construction
- 9 The Disposal Construction
- 10 Verb Copying and Reduplication
- 11 The Comparative Construction
- 12 The Ditransitive Construction
- 13 Aspect and Tense
- 14 Negation
- 15 The Boundedness of the Predicate
- 16 Classifiers
- 17 Demonstratives from Classifiers
- 18 Distal Demonstratives from Phonological Derivation
- 19 Pronouns, Plurals, and Diminutives
- 20 Structural Particles
- 21 Word Order and Relative Clauses
- 22 Conclusions
- References
- Primary Sources of Texts
- Index
4 - Serial Verb Construction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2023
- The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
- The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Conventions Used in the Examples
- Abbreviations and Symbols
- 1 Some Preliminaries
- 2 Copular Word and Construction
- 3 Focus and Wh- Words
- 4 Serial Verb Construction
- 5 Disyllabification
- 6 Resultative Construction
- 7 Information Structure
- 8 The Passive Construction
- 9 The Disposal Construction
- 10 Verb Copying and Reduplication
- 11 The Comparative Construction
- 12 The Ditransitive Construction
- 13 Aspect and Tense
- 14 Negation
- 15 The Boundedness of the Predicate
- 16 Classifiers
- 17 Demonstratives from Classifiers
- 18 Distal Demonstratives from Phonological Derivation
- 19 Pronouns, Plurals, and Diminutives
- 20 Structural Particles
- 21 Word Order and Relative Clauses
- 22 Conclusions
- References
- Primary Sources of Texts
- Index
Summary
In Old Chinese, where two or more verb phrases within a single clause (including adjectival and adverbial phrases) had to be connected by the conjunction ér or qiè, serial verb construction did not exist. In this grammatical system, it was impossible for any fusion and reanalysis across verb phrases to take place because the reanalysis had to involve a context consisting of more than one element that occurred adjacently. However, these conjunctions started to decline in Late Old Chinese and eventually died out in the first half of the Middle Chinese period, which enabled many grammatical changes to happen. Then, the first verb in a serial verb construction became grammaticalized into one of various grammatical markers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Evolution of Chinese Grammar , pp. 62 - 77Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023