The establishment of the classifier system and the grammaticalization of the morphosyntactic particle de in Chinese

Abstract

This paper analyzes the causal relationship between the establishment of the classifier system and the grammaticalization of the morphosyntactic particle de in the history of Chinese. By doing so, we try to answer a question relevant to grammaticalization theory: why should lexical items which are equally suitable for certain grammatical domain develop into morphological markers for that grammatical domain with different functions? We argue that grammaticalization is subject to the influence of the overall structural change of a language in a particular period of time. A language at different times may possess different optimal structures which serve the model triggering grammaticalization via analogy. An optimal structure shapes the path and degree of grammaticalization. Consequently, the grammatical markers innovated at different times for the same grammatical domain may behave differently. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.