The grammaticalizational relation between two Modern Chinese wo xiang 'I think' constructions

The main concern of this paper is with two constructions that are based on the Modern Chinese phrase wo xiang 'I think'. They are prosodically-dependent wo xiang that takes a question, an imperative, an exclamation or a conjectural clause (referred to as W1) and prosodically-independent wo xiang that takes a question, an imperative, an exclamation or a conjectural clause (referred to as W2). By contrasting phonetic and morphosyntactic properties of the two constructions, the paper takes issue with the widely accepted hypothesis (which assumes a W1 > W2 derivation) and argues that W1 is derived from W2, and that this derivational relationship can best be accounted for by using grammaticalization as a tool of reconstruction.