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It is generally agreed that in the earliest stages of Chinese a morphological system was in place which extended to aspectual marking on the verb (Sagart 1999; Gassmann and Behr 2005; Jīn 2005, 2006; Schuessler 2007). More particularly, it is assumed (e.g., Jīn 2005, 2006; Gassmann and Behr 2005) that the aspectual morphology of Ancient Chinese involved a distinction between the imperfective ( wèi wánchéng tǐ 未完成體) and the perfective aspect ( wánchéng tǐ 完成體), e.g., by a voiceless (imperfective) – voiced (perfective) alternation of the root initial, or – more frequen…

Ulrich Unger (born December 12, 1930 in Leipzig, died December 16, 2006 in Münster, Germany), was notable for his outstanding expertise in all fields concerning Early China; he was a scholar with manifold cultural interests, including literature, art, music, and cinema. His linguistic work covers all major aspects of Old Chinese: its phonology, lexicon, and grammar. In 1948, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig, first as a student of Classics and Oriental studies, and eventually focusing on Sinology. Academic teachers at the University of Leipzig…

The period at issue is an important transitional period for the Chinese language; by its end, the basis of the grammar of Modern Chinese had been fully established. The substantial changes the Chinese language is subject to during this period affect all aspects of grammar, i.e., phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. This article is mainly confined to syntactic changes; changes in the phonology, the morphology and the lexicon are discussed in separate articles. 1. The Written and Spoken Language Issue Although most Chinese texts from the Archaic period (comprising Earl…

Chinese does not distinguish different moods in the morphology of the verb; at all times modal values such as necessity and possibility can be realized by lexical means, i.e., modal auxiliary verbs and modal adverbs. Additionally, sentential mood (declarative, imperative, interrogative, or exclamatory) can be expressed by a number of sentence-final particles. In this article, only modal verbs are at issue covering a period from Late Archaic to Early Medieval, i.e., Middle Chinese (5th cent. BCE …