janet zhigun

For some three decades, scholars have been studying how a lexical item or a construction transforms to serve a grammatical function. Lexicalization is the reverse process, though in some contexts the word has a different meaning entirely. This research has been conducted almost exclusively in Indo-European and African languages, but linguists here investigate the phenomenon in Chinese. Their topics include the development of the Chinese aspectual sentence-final marker ye, a construction grammar approach to the grammaticalization of the directional verb l獺i, the semantic historical development of modal verbs of volition in Chinese, semantic changes in the grammaticalization of classifiers in Mandarin Chinese, and lexicalization in the history of the Chinese language. Annotation 穢2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)