This project examines how Middle Chinese Buddhist texts contributed to the grammaticalization of modal expressions in Middle Chinese, with a particular focus on “peripheral” modal markers whose diachronic trajectories have received relatively little scholarly attention. It argues that the development of these markers has often remained insufficiently explained because Buddhist texts have been neglected in Chinese historical linguistic research.
Based on transmitted Chinese corpora from the Eastern Han (25 - 220 CE) to the Tang dynasty (618 - 907 CE), supplemented where possible by Sanskrit parallels, the project investigates how Buddhist texts influenced the historical development of Chinese through different mechanisms. It further argues that, in the study of Chinese historical linguistics, the Buddhist corpus should neither be neglected nor simply incorporated into the non-Buddhist corpus as a neutral representation of Classical Chinese. Instead, Buddhist texts should be treated as a distinctive textual domain whose linguistic features, translation practices, and patterns of usage played an active role in the development of Middle Chinese grammar.