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East Asian Languages and Societies Commons

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Western Washington University

Social and Behavioral Sciences

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Change In The Usage Of 老 In Chinese Vernacular Literature, Matthew Taylor Horn Apr 2018

Change In The Usage Of 老 In Chinese Vernacular Literature, Matthew Taylor Horn

Western Libraries Undergraduate Research Award

This paper looks at the change in usage of the Chinese character lao (老) in vernacular literature of the Tang, Ming, and Xiandai (modern) periods. It is mainly a quantitative study of the change in lexical meaning of lao due to its grammaticalization as well as its morphological change from a free to bound morpheme. These changes will be studied in relation to lao’s affixation.