Diachronic Changes and Panchronic Universal Properties of Constructions and Grammatical Categories in Chinese-a Reconstruction of Historical Chinese Grammar

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It is needless to say that the semantic/structural properties of the various grammatical categories or grammatical constructions that can be found in modern Chinese today did not all exist in Chinese of previous times. Among them, some are panchronic properties that were passed down from the ancient era to modern days, whereas other properties have experienced various changes before their existence today. In this project five researchers refer to the outstanding analysis in recent studies of modern Chinese regarding the meaning and structure of the various grammatical categories/constructions, examine the pictures of different times in detail and discuss the findings, all together with the intention to clarify the differences between each era and the mechanism behind these changes. At the same time, this project is also aimed at finding out the universal properties of Chinese, which have stayed constant since ancient times, making it explicit that grammatical/semanticcategories that function panchronically do exist, and investigating the related parameters that motivated these categorizations.In this project, which we started in 2004, five researchers that commonly share the previously-mentioned purposes examined a series of topics, such as word order, voice and aspect, in each one's designated era With a careful analysis of the first-hand data, we have revealed the situation of Chinese in different eras. The results, including the analyses written in the final report, provide important descriptive data as well as theoretical foundations by demonstrating the variety of Chinese grammar in its diachronic changes and also the panchronic universal properties that it possesses. Therefore, these results can contribute to the reconstruction of historical Chinese grammar.