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Part of
Historical Linguistics 2019: Selected papers from the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Canberra, 1–5 July 2019
Edited by Bethwyn Evans, Maria Kristina Gallego and Luisa Miceli
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 367] 2024
► pp. 261–283

Chapter 11
The diachronic development of postverbal dé 得 in Chinese

| Stuttgart University | National Tsing Hua University
The modal dé 得 is one of the modal verbs of possibility in Late Archaic Chinese (LAC) and Early Middle Chinese (EMC). Different from other modals verbs of possibility, which are confined to preverbal position, dé 得 ‘obtain, get, manage to, can’ occurs in two different positions in Modern Chinese and other Sinitic languages: preverbal and postverbal. This chapter argues that the two different functions of de in modern Sinitic languages reflect two syntactic instantiations of de in LAC and EMC. The preverbal modal auxiliary developed from the modal auxiliary verb dé ‘manage to, can’, which only allows a vP complement, and the postverbal de developed from the lexical verb dé ‘get, obtain’, which allows a CP complement.
Keywords: grammaticalisation, modal verbs, Late Archaic Chinese, Early Middle Chinese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The diachronic development of DE from Late Archaic to Middle Chinese
    • 2.1DE as a lexical verb
    • 2.2DE as an auxiliary verb in LAC and EMC
      • I.Ability reading
      • II.Opportunity reading
      • III.Implicative reading
    • 2.3Deontic DE
  • 3.The complement of DE
    • 3.1DE with a vP complement
    • 3.2DE with a CP complement
  • 4.The development of postverbal DE
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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