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10 - Verb Copying and Reduplication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2023

Yuzhi Shi
Affiliation:
National University of Singapore
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Summary

This chapter deals with two innovative devices, the verb-copying construction and verb reduplication. The verb-copying construction was innovated approximately 300 years ago and is a relatively young construction that did not have any equivalent before the fifteenth century AD. Unlike the disposal construction, which is marked by a grammatical morpheme bǎ, the verb-copying construction represented an abstract syntactic structure without any specific lexical marking. The reduplication of nouns emerged around the third century BC and was taken over by classifiers after the sixth century AD, while a number of classifiers grammaticalized out of ordinary nouns. However, the reduplication of verbs did not exist until the thirteenth century AD, more than two millennia later than the reduplication of adjectives and adverbs.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Verb Copying and Reduplication
  • Yuzhi Shi, National University of Singapore
  • Book: The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
  • Online publication: 16 March 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108921831.010
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  • Verb Copying and Reduplication
  • Yuzhi Shi, National University of Singapore
  • Book: The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
  • Online publication: 16 March 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108921831.010
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Verb Copying and Reduplication
  • Yuzhi Shi, National University of Singapore
  • Book: The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
  • Online publication: 16 March 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108921831.010
Available formats
×