The inessive structure in archaic and medieval Chinese: An evolutionary study of inessive demonstrative uses from archaic to early modern Chinese

Location is an important category of space. In Chinese, from the times of Oracle-bone inscriptions to now, one of the means used to indicate space or location is the demonstrative pronoun. But before the medieval period there only was one kind of demonstrative pronoun which can be both used to demonstrate person and location. During the medieval period, an evolution occurred in the Chinese demonstrative pronoun system. In the pre-modern period Chinese had developed a system of inessive demonstrative pronoun, such as zhèlĭ 這裡 ‘here’, nàlĭ 那裡 ‘there’, zhèbiān 這邊 ‘this side’, nàbiān 那邊 ‘that side’, which are special demonstrative pronouns used only to indicate space and location. This paper focuses on the evolution and tries to answer the following questions: how did the evolution occur? What is the reason of the evolution? Copyright © 2008 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.