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Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Chinese Linguistics Année : 2023

Historical evolution of preposition stranding in Chinese: another case of cyclic change?

Résumé

A number of cyclical changes have already been noted in the historical evolution of some syntactic structures of Chinese (Peyraube 2017). The phenomenon of preposition stranding could be an additional example. Preposition stranding refers to a syntactic construction in which a preposition is left without a following object. This kind of construction is commonly found in English (where it usually occurs at the end of the sentence), but also in other Germanic languages or dialects, and also in some languages belonging to the Niger-Congo family, but it is almost non-existent in standard Mandarin. However, we can find stranded, hanging or dangling prepositions in contemporary various dialects, such as in the Zhangjiakou dialect (Hebei province). See, among others, the research works of Dong Xiufang (1998), Zong Shouyun (2019), Guo Rui (2009), and Zhang Yisheng (2009). It is also assumed that preposition stranding was quite common in Archaic Chinese up to the Early Medieval Chinese period. However, no systematic analysis has been done yet on these former stages of the Chinese language, and especially for Early Medieval and Late Medieval Chinese, when the Classical Chinese prepositions (comitative, instrumental, locative, ablative, allative, dative, etc.) yǐ and yú have become obsolete and have been replaced by other prepositions. This article tries to fill this gap and to show that there has been the following typological evolution from Archaic to Contemporary Chinese: [more preposition stranding] > [less preposition stranding] > [more preposition stranding]

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Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-03817980 , version 1 (17-10-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03817980 , version 1

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Alain Peyraube, Lin Xiao. Historical evolution of preposition stranding in Chinese: another case of cyclic change?. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 2023. ⟨hal-03817980⟩
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