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Article Dans Une Revue Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics Année : 2022

Diachronical evolution of posture verbs in Chinese

Résumé

The linguistic properties of the three most common verbs of posture, which express positions, such as zuò ‘sit’, zhàn ‘stand, tang ‘lie’ have been thoroughly studied in a wide range of languages belonging to typologically different language families, but they have never been extensively investigated in Chinese. Our article paper traces the diachrony of these verbs from the Archaic Chinese period (5th - 2nd centuries BCE, corresponding to the Classical Chinese by excellence) to the present-day Chinese, showing that they have very rarely been grammaticalized into aspect markers, as has been the case in other languages. We also examine the semantic distinction between the expression of a dynamic vs. static action, as well as the syntactic behavior of these positional verbs. We finally discuss their links with locative / existential verbs from the Early Medieval Chinese onwards (3rd c. CE) and the grammaticalization path that has been hypothesized according to which the posture verbs have been first reanalyzed into locative/existential verbs before being grammaticalized into aspectual markers will be tested.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-03484232 , version 1 (20-03-2023)
hal-03484232 , version 2 (21-03-2023)

Identifiants

Citer

Lin Xiao. Diachronical evolution of posture verbs in Chinese. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2022, 58 (4), pp.933-956. ⟨10.1515/psicl-2022-0035⟩. ⟨hal-03484232v2⟩
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