You's Grammatical Meaning and Its Emergence

2009
In a subjectless sentence,you("have")is a marker of an indefinite topic.The use has come into being through its grammaticalizationfrom the you in existent sentences.The process is realized in two ways.First,you's existentialmeaning was graduallybleached for the change of its syntactic environment and,second,you incorporated the indefinite meaning through its long-lasting co-occurrencewith noun phrasesthat express indefinite numerical meanings.In a subjectless sentence,you's indefinite meaning was always made prominent and thus it graduallyturned into a grammatical marker.
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