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The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers
to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is
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Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
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Between Verb and Preposition: Diachronic Stages of Coverbs in Mandarin ChineseJones, Glynis 03 April 2023 (has links)
Mandarin Chinese has long been known to possess a category of words known as ‘coverbs’ in the literature, which sit in the gray area between verb and preposition. Li and Thompson (1974) describe the historical origins of Mandarin coverbs to be full transitive verbs, despite their modern state being decidedly less verbal. They also note that coverbs are a non-homogenous class. This thesis works to establish categories of coverbs in Mandarin Chinese and their distance from true verbhood in order to understand the diachronic shift that coverbs are currently undergoing before our very eyes. I will draw on the work of scholars of Atlantic-Congo languages, Oceanic languages, and other languages of mainland Southeast Asia, to create semantic, syntactic, and morphological testing for Mandarin coverbs. Using the results of this three-pronged testing approach, I will map the results on a six-pointed verb-preposition matrix in order to visualize the space between verb and preposition and how Mandarin coverbs inhabit it. I will then use these diagrams to create a numerical score for each category of coverb and place them on a linear progression between verbhood and prepositionhood. Lastly, this work will analyze the theta roles assigned by Mandarin coverbs in each category and propose stages of diachronic development for Mandarin coverbs.
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