This innovative study on the phenomenon of 'grammaticalization' and its manifestation in Chinese provides new insights into language change in Chinese and a large number of grammatical topics. Grammaticalization occurs in all of the world's languages. Xiu-Zhi Zoe Wu demonstrates general linguistic principles present and active in the phenomenon of grammaticalization whilst also describing the modelling of language in formal theoretical approaches to syntax; so this book fills two major gaps in the current study of linguistics. Grammaticalization and Language Change in Chinese illuminates how studies of language development and change provide special insights into the understanding of current, synchronic systems of language. Using patters from Chinese, the author establishes cross-linguistic generalizations about language change and grammaticalization. This book should be of great interest to Chinese linguists and readers interested in language change in different languages.

This book investigates the origin and development of a range of grammatical words in Chinese and how such morphemes have undergone reanalysis as new functional categories via different mechanisms of grammaticalization. Though the majority of work on grammaticalization is carried out in more traditional, descriptive approaches, this book adopts a formal Chomskyean framework and combines this with insights from traditional grammaticalization to attempt to solve a number of puzzles in modern Chinese syntax. The use of a formal theoretic approach to the development of functional categories is shown to result in different kinds of questions being posed relative to grammaticalization, and results in a variety of different insights into processes of reanalysis. Among other topics, the book considers the structure and development of relative clauses, DPs, aspect, tense, and evidential markers in Chinese, and shows how variation in the interpretation of grammatical morphemes can be given a formal modelling which explicitly reduces such variation to properties of the syntactic structure. As the processes of grammaticalization described for Chinese are argued to be cross-linguisti available,