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1 results

  • 15 - The Boundedness of the Predicate

  • Yuzhi Shi, National University of Singapore
  • Book:
    The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
    Published online:
    16 March 2023
    Print publication:
    23 March 2023, pp 386-395

  • Summary

    Due to the analogy of the combinatorial power of these newly acquired devices of the grammar, the structure of the predicate in Contemporary Chinese is grammatically required to be bounded by some means; otherwise, the sentence may be ill-formed. In Contemporary Chinese, specifically, a sentence sounds incomplete unless aspect markers, time words, quantifiers, preposition phrases, or resultatives are added. From Middle Chinese to the present day, the Chinese language has acquired many grammatical constructions and markings, including mainly the resultative construction, the aspect system, verb reduplication, and verb classifiers. All of these grammatical apparatuses have something in common: they are suffixed with the matrix verb to constitute an immediate constituent. As a consequence, they all function to make the matrix verb bounded in some sense.