The emergence of disjunction: A history of constructionalization in Chinese

What is it about?

All languages have some structure that expresses the idea of two things being alternatives. English uses "or" to connect alternative items. Its Chinese counterpart developed from an expression of uncertainty, through intermediate stages where the expression is used to enumerate items in a set or contrast possible options. It is through frequent uses of such patterns that the Chinese structure emerged.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Historical corpus-data give the study a solid empirical grounding. A usage-based constructionist framework explains the frequency-based pairing of utterance-level pragmatics with a larger constructional pattern.

Perspectives