Analogy and Reanalysis in the Postposing of Durative and Iterative Adverbials in the History of Chinese

Abstract

This study attempts to examine both speakers’ motivations for and grammatical mechanisms involved in the postposing of temporal adverbials denoting duration (e.g. santian ‘for three days’) and iteration (e.g. sanci ‘three times’) over the course of the history of the Chinese language. It will point out that durative and iterative adverbials delimit event type, similar to quantized NPs in direct object position (e.g. san ping jiu ‘three bottles of wine’) which have consistently been postverbal. It analyzes how the event delimiting function shared by these temporal adverbials and quantized NPs motivated speakers to align all these structures in the postverbal position. It also discusses that as a mechanism of word order change, situation-delimiting adverbials such as sanci/santian were reanalyzed as pseudo-objects (e.g. jie zhebenshu jie le sanci/santian ‘borrowed this book three times/for three days’) in Early Mandarin, and distinguished syntactically from other purely temporal adverbials denoting frequency (e.g. changchang, ‘often’) or temporal frame (e.g. zai santian zhinei, ‘in three days’).