The project seeks to describe and explain how and, wherever possible, why the grammatical structures of the Chinese language have evolved over the past 1,700 years. The description and explanations are based on data gleaned from more than 30 vernacular texts. These texts were written over the last 1,700 hundred years. They include fantasy stories, popular plays, Buddhist sermons, travel memoirs, confessions, and some novels. History, social conditions, dialectal variations are also taken into account as critical factors in causing grammatical change. The theoretical contribution of the project will fall in the area of the mechanisms of grammatical change, i.e. the nature and process of grammatical change.
