The ditransitive construction is an essential grammatical device that has always existed throughout the history of Chinese. However, its semantic and syntactic properties have varied quite dramatically over time due to the influence of the general grammatical system in different periods. Generally, the ditransitive construction of the Chinese language has undergone a typological change, which makes the Chinese ditransitive construction inconsistent with SVO languages.

This chapter analyses the causal relationship between the establishment of the classifier system and the grammaticalization of the morphosyntactic particle de in the history of the Chinese language. It demonstrates that the grammaticalization of a lexical item is subject to the influence of the overall structural change of a language in a particular time period.

The final chapter explores the relevance of this grammar of Korean to two particular contexts of application (i) teaching Korean as a foreign language and (ii) translation and interpreting (T&I). It begins with a discussion of traditional approaches to teaching Korean as a foreign language and then illustrates the way the grammar can be drawn on to inform a pedagogic practice based on Reading to Learn (R2L) – focusing on locative relational clauses. The chapter then turns to relevance of the grammar to the field of translation and interpreting, beginning with an interpretation example and moving on to a translation example. The chapter concludes with a brief note on additional fields of application.

This chapter is a conclusion, including some significant generalizations from the evolutionary history of Chinese grammar. The topics include (a) the momentum of language change, (b) changes in cluster, (c) patterns of grammatical changes, (d) drivers of language change, and (e) construction schema.

This chapter discusses a fundamental change in copula structures from Old to Middle Chinese, which in turn caused a series of consequent developments that significantly altered the texture of Chinese grammar at the time. Old Chinese lacks such a copula verb, as there is no linking verb between the subject and the complement, and the copula construction at the time was obligatorily marked by a sentence-final particle yě that followed the complement, unlike other verbs.

This chapter is an introduction, addressing some preliminary issues: (a) the readership of this book; (b) the long history of the Chinese language as a natural laboratory in testing hypotheses in linguistics, human cognition, and civilization; (c) the periodization of the Chinese language; (d) the selection of historical texts; and (e) the structure of this book.

This chapter focuses on grammatical resources for enacting social relations – mood. A basic distinction is drawn between the systems of formal mood and addressee deference on the one hand and the systems of informal mood, stance and politeness on the other. Subsequently the systems of polarity, modality, participant deference, highlight, comment and expletion are outlined. For each system the relevant choices for meaning are consolidated in system networks and their realisation in structure at clause, group/phrase and word ranks is specified.

This chapter addresses the typological change in relative clauses from postnominal to prenominal position over time. It is also proposed that the constituent order between the relative clause and the head noun is not directly related to the verb and its argument as is generally assumed in the literature but is correlated with the ordering between the VP and PP instead. The diachronic evidence of Chinese shows that the order change of PP from postverbal to preverbal position was the critical motivation for the change in question.

This chapter addresses the motivations and mechanisms behind the following shifts. The structures and functions of Chinese passives underwent three typologically significant changes: (a) the passive morphemes in Old Chinese could not introduce any agent phrase in preverbal position, but those in Contemporary Chinese must introduce an agent noun to make the passive structure well formed; (b) the agent phrase could be introduced only in postverbal position in Old Chinese but is exclusively constrained to preverbal position in Contemporary Chinese; and (c) the passive morphemes are extremely diverse in Contemporary Chinese, including four markers in Mandarin Chinese and at least sixty-nine markers in the other dialects that have grammaticalized from different lexical sources but have quite uniform structures and functions, where the presence of an agent is generally obligatory.

This chapter discusses the diachronic sources and the synchronic properties of the resultative construction from various angles, including a brief cross-linguistic comparison of similar phenomena; an investigation of the semantic, syntactic, and phonological properties of the resultative construction; and a consideration of its obligatory application in certain syntactic constructions.