The paper is a case study of the zi constructions in the historical development of Chinese focusing on morphemic relationship, its structural properties, and paths of semantic change. The data are mainly based on the Buddhist texts as well as non-Buddhist texts spanning the period from East Han to Southern Song, epitomizing Middle Chinese and early Modern Chinese. The major claim in the paper is that the semantic change of zi can be taken as a kind of grammaticalization in that it enriches its functional perspective through the mechanism of semantic extension in conjunction with grammaticalization. In particular, zi ultimately grows into a suffix as a result of change of the zi construction into a derivative construction.
