The linguistic properties of the three most common verbs of posture, which express positions, such as zuò ‘sit’, zhàn ‘stand’, tǎng ‘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 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.

中文翻译：

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汉语姿势动词的历时演变

表示位置的三个最常见的姿势动词的语言属性，例如作'坐'，zhàn'站立'，tǎng“谎言”已在属于类型学不同语系的各种语言中得到了深入研究，但从未在中文中得到广泛研究。我们的文章追溯了这些动词从古汉语时期（公元前 5 至 2 世纪，优秀地对应于古典汉语）到现代汉语的历时性，表明它们很少被语法化为体标记，正如其他语言的情况。我们还研究了动态与静态动作表达之间的语义区别，以及这些位置动词的句法行为。我们最终讨论了它们与早期中世纪汉语（公元 3 世纪）以后的方位/存在动词的联系。