Abstract
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.
5 Acknowledgement
This work is part of a project on the verbs of posture in Sinitic languages that has received funding from the Fondation des Treilles (Grant JC-03-20) which we would like to thank here. The present article is also a reworking and extension of a paper that has been presented at the 10th International Symposium on Grammaticalization, held at Sanxia University (China) in October 2019. We would like to thank Long Haiping, Wang Weihui, Wu Fuxiang and Wu Fang for their advice and suggestions, as well as the discussants for their comments during our report and the two reviewers for this article who have given us very insightful suggestions and comments.
7 Abbreviations
- 1
first person pronoun
- 2
second person pronoun
- 3
third person pronoun
- ACC
accusative
- CAUS
causative
- CLF
classifier
- COP
copula
- DEM
demonstrative
- DUR
durative
- MODIF
modifier
- NEG
negation
- NP
Noun Phrase
- OBI
Oracle BoneInscriptions
- OM
object marker
- PFV
perfective
- PL
plural
- POSS
possessive
- PROG
progressive
- PRT
final particle
- SEM
semelfactive
- SG
singular
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