The emergence of a grammatical category definite article in spoken Chinese

Contrary to assumptions endemic among grammarians working in Chinese linguistics that Chinese lacks a determiner system, I argue the definite determiner is found to regularly emerge from speaker-hearer negotiation in specific, identifiable interactional contexts where the speaker has reason to believe the identity of a referent to be a community shared knowledge which s/he can exploit. Cases of the definite determiner emergence can then be seen as a recurrent and possibly expectable set of interactional moves. I have further argued that the developing definite determiner function of the distal demonstrative nage is breaking through into the language first in the non-subject position of the sentence and that it is the distal nage that is being grammaticalized as the definite determiner in spoken discourse.