Prosodically Constrained Localizers in Classical and Modern Chinese [chapter]

Shengli Feng
2014 Space and Quantification in Languages of China  
This paper discusses the Chinese localizers in terms of prosody. It argues that the development of localizers in Classical Chinese was a typological change from a synthetic to an analytic language type (Huang, Syntactic analyticity: the other end of the parameters . LSA Summer Institute Lecture Notes. MIT/Harvard, 2005, Xu, Typological change in Chinese syntax. Oxford Press, Oxford/New York, 2006) conditioned on the "multi-syllabic constraint" (Sun, Two conditions and grammaticalization of the
more » ... hinese locative. In Xu D (ed) Space in languages of China: cross-linguistic, synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Springer Science, Heidelberg, pp 199-288, 2008) which is a sub-case of the prosodic effects determined by the Nuclear Stress Rule and the newly developed disyllabic foot structure (Feng, Linguistics 6:1085-1122. Historical evidence is provided to demonstrate the grammaticalization process of localizers with the parallel development of light verbs and light nouns in the history of Chinese.
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-10040-1_2 fatcat:jimbxqfuyzb2ni66ck6jpsjhw4