Author(s)

Yuxi Yan ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Department of Applied Linguistics, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, 215123, China

Corresponding Author

Yuxi Yan

ABSTRACT

The continued evolution of coverbs has led to the ineffectiveness of traditional criteria. In the 21st century, the emerging definition refutes the conventional view and opens up further possibilities for the identification of coverbs. The analysis finds that ba considered to be a prototypical coverb can have a verbal meaning, while other scholars believe that yong that functions as a verb can have a prepositional meaning. Thus, traditional syntactic properties are invalid to illustrate coverbs' grammaticalization and the semantic approach still lacks a clear boundary to distinguish CoVCs and SVCs practically. These arguments are not an assertion that the methods of their predecessors are wrong, but merely an indication that these approaches may not apply to judging coverbs' grammaticalization in contemporary literary languages entirely. Thus, this paper will use contemporary literature as the main field of inquiry and the corpus as the data source to argue for the grammaticalization of coverbs in modern Mandarin.

KEYWORDS

Grammaticalization, coverbs, BCC Chinese Corpus

CITE THIS PAPER

Yuxi Yan, Grammaticalization of Coverbs in Modern Mandarin Chineses. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2023) Vol. 6: 65-71. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2023.061512.

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