Semantic change and grammaticalization of the universal quantifier mĕi in Chinese

Abstract

This study investigates the development of the universal quantifier mĕi ‘every’ in Mandarin Chinese. Through quantitative analysis of historical texts (eleventh century BC – twentieth century AD), it shows that mĕi underwent three steps of semantic change and grammaticalization: (1) the development of the adverbial meaning ‘often/frequently’ from its (predicative) adjective meaning ‘flourishing/abundant’; (2) the emergency of the singularitive quantifi er meaning ‘every time’; and (3) the extension to the determiner distributive universal quantifier meaning ‘every’. It is argued that while the first and second step of semantic change are clear cases of metaphoricalization and metonymization respectively, the third step, namely the extension to the determiner distributive universal quantifier meaning ‘every’, was triggered by semantic reanalysis (Xing, Semantic reanalysis and semantic change in grammaticalization in Chinese. In: Zhuo Jing-Schmidt (ed) Increased empiricism: recent advances in Chinese linguistics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp 223–246, 2013), a pathway uncommon in semantic change and grammaticalization in Indo-European languages. The result of this study, along with studies of universal quantifiers in Indo-European languages (Haspelmath, Diachronic sources of ‘all’ and ‘every’. In: Bach et al. (eds) Quantification in natural languages. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London, pp 263–382, 1995), should shed some light on the understanding of the development of universal quantifiers in genetically unrelated languages.