Abstract
This paper investigates the grammaticalization of “po” on the basis of a survey on examples from Chinese classic works, and finds that: 1) the use of “po” shifted from an adjective to a degree adverb and a scope adverb; 2) the use of “po” shifted from an objective scope adverb to a modal adverb. This paper focuses on the syntactic environment that triggered the grammaticalization of “po” and how it became a functional word. The increasing subjectivity of this functional word is also discussed.
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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Yang, H. (2014). Grammaticalization and Subjectivization of “Po”. In: Su, X., He, T. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8922. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14331-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14331-6_13
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14331-6
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