title: Word-Order Change and Grammaticalization in the History of Chinese
author:  Chaofen Sun 
description: This is a very important work, the first book in English on the historical grammar of Chinese. The scholarship is excellent, and besides discovering and presenting fresh data, the author also makes significant contributions to theoretical analysis.Alain Peyraube, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
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  # GRAMMATICALIZATION AND LANGUAGE CHANGE IN CHINESE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This innovative study of grammaticalization in Chinese offers a highly
  accessible and comprehensive overview of both the diachronic development and
  current syntactic status of a wide variety of grammatical morphemes in
  Chinese. Approaching the issue of grammaticalization from a formal,
  theoretical point of view, but also making use of traditional insights into
  language change, Xiu-Zhi Zoe Wu shows how a range of syntactic mechanisms have
  conspired to result in the grammatical constructions and functional morphemes
  of modern Chinese. Patterns from Chinese and an in-depth analysis of the
  development of functional categories in the language are also used to argue
  for more general, cross-linguistic principles of language change, and provide
  valuable insights into the principled ways that grammatical words evolve
  across languages.
  
  _Grammaticalization and Language Change in Chinese_ is a bold and inspired
  