Emergence of Evaluative Completive hao in Mandarin
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Completive markers can express speakers’ attitudes in Japanese and Korean (Strauss, 2002; Davis and Gutzmann, 2015). However, crosslinguistic variations and changes of these evaluative completives have not been extensively studied. This paper offers a diachronic study of V-hao ‘good’ in Chinese, a similar evaluative completive expressing a speaker’s positive attitude. We propose that hao ‘good’ started with its evaluative meaning as a subjective adjective, and later acquired aspectual semantics, suggesting variations in paths of multi-dimensional meanings for completives.