The grammaticalizational relation between two Modern Chinese wo xiang ‘I think’ constructions

Publication date: Available online 10 November 2017 Source:Language Sciences Author(s): Hai-Ping Long, Bernd Heine, Gui-Jun Ruan, Meng-Yue Wu The main concern of this paper is with two constructions that are based on the Modern Chinese phrase wo xiang ‘I think’. They are prosodically-dependent wo xiang that takes a question, an imperative, an exclamation or a conjectural clause (referred to as W1) and prosodically-independent wo xiang that takes a question, an imperative, an exclamation or a conjectural clause (referred to as W2). By contrasting phonetic and morphosyntactic properties of the two constructions, the paper takes issue with the widely accepted hypothesis (which assumes a W1 > W2 derivation) and argues that W1 is derived from W2, and that this derivational relationship can best be accounted for by using grammaticalization as a tool of reconstruction.
Source: Language Sciences - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research