Negative systems have historically undergone several major changes that were caused by the overall properties of the grammatical system in particular periods. The functions of negatives in any period had to be consonant with the predicate structure, especially the structure of verbal predicates. This chapter addresses the developments of negatives that are most relevant to the establishment of the negative system of Contemporary Chinese rather than exhaustively surveying all negatives in history.

This chapter focuses on grammatical resources for composing information flow, focusing on theme. It begins with a basic introduction to textual clause structure – Theme and Rheme. It then describes the different types of Theme (Topical Theme, Interpersonal Theme and Textual Theme) and their grammatical realisation. The contribution of each type of Theme is illustrated in short texts illustrating their role in managing texture. The chapter concludes with a discussion of thematic progression and introduces guidelines for recognising types of Theme in discourse.

This chapter demonstrates that the demonstratives zhè and gè in Mandarin Chinese and its dialects were grammaticalized from two general classifiers in late Middle Chinese, both of which originated from ordinary nouns. Based on diachronic facts and dialectal data, the present analysis addresses the motivation and mechanism for the course of development from classifiers to demonstratives. This finding may make a significant contribution to historical linguistics.

At the very beginning of documented history, Chinese already possessed the comparative structure, but since then it has undergone fundamental changes in structure and markings. As a result, the comparative structure in present-day Chinese looks odd and does not fit any pattern of language universals on the basis of a typological investigation. This chapter explains the typological change in the Chinese comparative construction.

This chapter discusses phonological motivations for morpho-syntactic changes in history. In general, Old Chinese was monosyllabic, which means that the overwhelming majority of words were represented by a single syllable, regardless of whether they were content or function words. In Middle Chinese, the phonological system was dramatically simplified; the number of consonants and vowels was reduced, and the syllabic structures were simplified. To restore the phonological distinctions of lexical items, the language increased the number of syllables for words, typically by adding one syllable to originally monosyllabic words. This disyllabification tendency has lasted nearly two millennia since then. This new sort of prosodic unit stimulated the fusion of two monosyllabic items, a key factor for the emergence of the resultative construction and other grammatical morphemes.

This chapter introduces the appliable linguistics theory, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), informing this grammar of Korean. The three basic theoretical dimensions of SFL are outlined – stratification (levels of language), rank (constituency) and metafunction (kinds of meaning). The approach to the distinctive relation of system to structure in SFL is then explained, including the formalisation of paradigmatic relations in system networks. The chapter closes with an outline of the book as a whole.

This chapter discusses changes in pronominal systems throughout history and explores the motivations for the emergence of plurals and diminutives in Modern Chinese. The emergence of the plural morpheme was motivated by the classifier system; the distribution of the plural morphemes was also influenced by classifiers. The earliest uses of these plurals were attested around the eighth century AD, but their widespread use occurred after the tenth century AD.

This chapter focuses on grammatical resources for construing logical relations between clauses. The chapter begins by clarifying the distinction between a clause simplex and a clause complex and the distinction between a clause complex and a verbal group complex. Subsequently the basic oppositions between parataxis and hypotaxis on the one hand and between projection and expansion on the other are introduced and relevant resources are then presented, section by section, in more detail. A sample analysis of a longer clause complex rounds off the discussion.

As indicated in Chapter Two, during its history, Chinese underwent a dramatic typological change from being a rigid wh-movement language to being a complete wh- in situ language. Roughly speaking, in the period of Old Chinese, wh-words used as objects needed to be fronted to the preverbal position , though Chinese was an SVO language, like English . However, during the first half of Middle Chinese, wh- movements were gradually replaced by wh- in situ.

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.

Based on a database of more than 1,000 subdialects of Chinese, this chapter demonstrates that the distal demonstratives in these subdialects are phonologically derived from their corresponding proximal demonstratives, which were themselves grammaticalized from classifiers in Late Middle Chinese. This finding identifies a new type of mechanism leading to the emergence of grammatical items: within a pair of two closely related grammatical elements, the basic and unmarked member originates from a lexical source, and gives rise to the other member through certain phonological principles. The domain of demonstratives thus illustrates how processes of grammaticalization and phonological derivation can interact, giving rise to the emergence of new grammatical forms.