The Particle Zhe in Northwestern Chinese: A New Type of Contact-Induced Grammatical Change

This book presents an analysis of a particular grammatical phenomenon in Northwestern Chinese, a.k.a. Northwestern Chinese dialects, uncovering a new pattern of contact-induced changes, which can be termed “compromise innovation”. In the vast majority of Northwestern Chinese dialects, the imperfective marker Zhe, which behaves like a verb suffix in most Chinese dialects, exhibits a number of peculiar characteristics. The most prominent one is that it occurs in an unusual syntactic position where