ABSTRACT
This book is an investigation of the phenomenon of grammaticalization and its manifestation in the development and synchronic status of a range of grammatical morphemes and functional categories in Chinese. There are two primary aims in the investigation: first to see how a study of various functional paradigms in Chinese may shed further light on the mechanisms of language change and grammaticalization that are generally available cross-linguistically, and secondly to examine how the use of diachronic information may help in the analysis of certain otherwise problematic synchronic phenomena in Chinese.
