Prosodically constrained localizers in classical and modern Chinese

Abstract

This paper discusses the Chinese localizers in terms 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, Syntactic analyticity: the other end of the parameters.LSA Summer Institute Lecture Notes. MIT/Harvard, 2005, Xu, Typological change in Chinese syntax. Oxford Press, Oxford/New York, 2006) conditioned on the “multi-syllabic constraint” (Sun, Two conditions and grammaticalization of the Chinese locative. In Xu D (ed) Space in languages of China: cross-linguistic, synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Springer Science, Heidelberg, pp 199–288, 2008) which is a sub-case of the prosodic effects determined by the Nuclear Stress Rule and the newly developed disyllabic foot structure (Feng, Linguistics 6:1085–1122, 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.