ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 discusses the localizers in Chinese from the perspective of prosody. It argues that the development of localizers in Classical Chinese was a typological change from a synthetic to an analytic language type (Huang, 2005; Xu, 2006) conditioned on the “multi-syllabic constraint” (Sun, 2008) which is a sub-case of the prosodic effects determined by the Nuclear Stress Rule and the newly developed disyllabic foot structure (Feng, 2003). Historical evidence is provided to demonstrate the grammaticalization process of localizers with the parallel development of light verbs and light nouns in the history of Chinese.
