ABSTRACT
In the history of the Sinitic languages, the time from the late Tang dynasty to the Southern Song dynasty is extremely poor in colloquial documents. The differences between the literary and the colloquial language were relatively small. Moreover, they both furnish very few materials that may be considered typically colloquial. The phrase “transitory times” does not indicate a turning point, but rather a very badly documented period in terms of written vernacular Chinese. In relation to the Sinitic languages and other languages of the region, however, “reduplication” usually refers to syllables. This is a separate question from reduplication’s function. The language of the analyzed text of the Zhuzi yulei has a relatively developed system of marking the direction of an action of the verb expressed by postpositional verbs. In modern Sinitic languages, there are units of measurement and classifiers constituting separate systems. Each Sinitic language contains a general classifier and a rather complicated system of individual classifiers.
