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Synchronic vs diachronic

Bibliography

孟昭連, 之乎者也非口語論 (Nanking, 2017).
完權, '從「的」到「之」', in「的」的性質與功能 (rev. edn, Peking, 2018), 165–90.

Synchronic description is possible only in the narrow sense of 'descriptive'. Language being a living object, any rational explanation of a linguistic phenomenon has to be a historical one.

The corollary is that to explain any grammatical structure in a language at a given point in time, one needs to study the evidence in the previous several hundred years for all related structures in chronological order. Any theory drawn from a snapshot at one point in time alone is a mere fantasy with no basis in reality.

Example

Wan (2018) compares -的 and -之 from discontinuous periods when he should have examined Republican sources where both were used side by side. Meng (2017) also appeared too late to allow an accurate understanding of -之.