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The formation of the Chinese locative "collostruction"
Chaofen Sun
Center of East Asian Studies, Stanford University

This paper proposes two conditions on the present-day Chinese locative
construction on the basis of its syntactic distributions. Arguments will be
given to demonstrate that there is neither postposition (Li & Thompson 1981,
Ernst 1988, Wu 2006) nor circumposition (D. Liu 2003) in Chinese similar to
the Amharic circumposition observed by Greenberg (1995). Second, there will
be discussion on the importance of spatial nominals as a special type of
Chinese nominals as part of the Chinese locative construction. Chinese is a
language typologically behaving like a Mayan language Yukatek that has only
two to four (one generic) spatial adpositions and many important spatial
nominals (Levinson et. 2003). This paper proposes two conditions on the
present-day Chinese locative construction on the basis of its syntactic
distributions. Third, following the grammaticalization of zai as a renewal
process emerged the two conditions: a selectional restriction and a
multi-syllabic constraint that define the prototypical locative construction
in the present time on a continuum. That is, the preposition zai heading the
locative construction selects either a definite NP or a spatial nominal. The
multi-syllabic constraint is primarily proposed for the spatial nominals.
The so-called postpositions are actually NP enclitics (F. Liu’s 1998),
functioning to signal a spatial meaning lacking in the preposition zai.
Evidence gathered from historical maps produced by Tan (1982) reveals that
the multi-syllabic constraint became dominant on place names in the Han
dynasty (206 BCE-220CE). In analogy with the multi-syllabic place names that
commonly occur in the construction, spatial nominals were derived from
non-spatial morphemes with a spatial term such as shang “upside,” xia
“downside,” etc. These spatial terms become an NP enclitic forming a
phonological unit with its stem in present-day Chinese. These two conditions
became dominant about the time of Yuan dynasty (14th century). Following
Himmelmann’s (2004) characterization, in which three types of expansion
(host-class, syntactic, and semantic-pragmatic) are essential to
grammaticalization, special attention are given to the expansions of the two
conditions in these three domains.

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