Abstract
Saying verb is one of the most highly frequent used words in all languages across the world, and during the course of its long-time usage many complex grammatical usages derived from its original meaning of saying.With-in that complex domain of usages, the complementizer usage is an essential part of the whole picture of grammaticalization of saying verbs. In actuality, in some languages saying verbs have become one of the main resources for the occurrence of complementizers (Heine 1991), and in Chinese there also exists that phenomenon.According to Fang(2003), in Peking mandarin once the seri-al verb construction“speech act verbs+ shuo”is forged, the semantic mean-ing of shuo begins to decay thus producing the possibility that shuo can be reinterpreted as special linking word ushering in content of speech.Similarly, Wang, Y-F., Katz, A. and Chen, C-H (2003), based on their study of gram-maticalization of shuo in Taiwan mandarin, proposed that grammaticalizationof the verb shuo into a complementizer evidently begins when the general saying verbshuois used to reinforce a variety of verbs of saying in the matrix clause.
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