Abstract
This paper aims at showing how the Pre-Qin verb lai [來], a free morpheme in Modern Chinese, split into functional markers of various kinds in Medieval Chinese, from the perspective of constructions which investigate form-meaning pairs. It demonstrates the following scenarios. Firstly, the meaning of the construction where lai acts as a component is responsible for its functional shifts. Secondly, the functional shifts of lai did not occur randomly or by accident, but rather occurred in the frame of constructions, dominated by the linguistic systems, in accordance with the historical trends of developments. Finally, the original verb lai remained active in Modern Chinese despite these changes, since all the functional shifts are restricted to the components in the constructions.