ABSTRACT
Chapter four discussed in detail the ongoing syntactic change taking place in shi-de structures when a sentence-final de re-positions itself between the verb and its object. In the course of the chapter it was mentioned that such repositioning of an element from a sentence-final position to one right-adjacent to the verb in fact has a clear historical precedent in Mandarin Chinese and that the element le/liao is known to have undergone a similar change in position. This surface parallelism in the re-positioning of de and le discussed in chapter four is schematized below in (1):
(1) a. V Object de → V-deObject
b. V Object liao → V-liao/le Object
