AvH Research Project Ref. 3.5 – 1203458 -CHN – HFST-E

Grammatical changes of Chinese comment clauses: A typological perspective

This project explores an area that is of concern to contemporary grammaticalization, discourse as well as typological studies, namely how to distinguish between grammaticalization, pragmaticalization and lexicalization on the basis of regularities in language change in individual languages as well as cross-linguistically. The starting point for the project is the preliminary research on Chinese comment clauses. In a second step, comment clauses will be studied from both a synchronic and a diachronic point of view; this study will then be extended to English and other languages.

The innovative value of the project consists in the novel pathway of grammatical development it identifies for comment clauses, which is instrumental in clarifying the boundaries between major processes of language change such as grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, and lexicalization. Further on, it has the potential to resolve a major issue within the newly elaborated framework of Discourse Grammar, namely the inter-dynamics between processes such as cooptation and grammaticalization.

Principal Investigator / Research Fellow: Prof. Dr. Haiping Long (Sun Yat-Sen University, Republic of China)

Host Professor / Collaborator: Prof. Dr. Tania Kouteva-Kuteva (Heinrich-Heine University, Germany/SOAS, University of London, UK)

Funding Period: 2019 - 2022