The constructionalization and constructional change of noncanonical V-NP expressions in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This paper investigates the process of constructionalization and constructional change of apparently noncanonical yet highly frequent V-NP expressions in Mandarin Chinese, which exist in other languages as well (e.g., Southeast Asian languages and African languages). A corpus-based survey of 20 frequently used monosyllabic verbs shows that both the token and the type frequency of the noncanonical V-NP expressions have on the whole been increasing throughout the history of the Chinese language. From a constructional perspective, it is proposed that the noncanonical V-NP structure has gone through a process of grammatical constructionalization and constructional change (Traugott & Trousdale 2013), which involves diachronic changes in productivity, schematicity and compositionality and which is manifested in the increasing number of the semantic types of postverbal NPs.