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Dialect grammar in Two early modern Southern Min texts: A comparative study of dative kit, comitative cang and diminutive -guia
Abstract
In this analysis, I use a typological perspective to compare certain grammatical features of modern Southern Min dialects sch as Taiwanese and Amoy (Xiamen) with those found in the Southern Min translation of the Doctrina Christiana (ca. 1607 AD) and a Southern Min grammar written in Spanish: Arte de la lengua Chio Chiu (1620 AD). The specific grammatical constructions and categories which are investigated are dative, causative and passive constructions formed with kit(sic), 'to give;' comitative, ablative and benefactive constructions formed with cang (sic) (ka) 'with;' and the development of the diminutive marker -kia, -ia and -nia (sic) (-a) from the lexeme 'son.' The objective is to ascertain if these syntactic and morphological constructions have undergone any major grammatical changes over the last 4 centuries in Soutehrn Min. In fact, some functions of these markers prove to be similar to Taiwanese Soutehrn Min, such as certain uses of comitative cang (sic) (ka), while other markers appear to be distinct but are found elsewhere in Min dialects, such as the passive and causative marker kit (sic) (khit). The findings illustrate examples of grammatical renovation as the consequence of competing forms, phonological attrition and polysemous conceptual shift as the outcome of different paths of grammaticalization.
... 8 What is interesting to observe about most of the causative verbs used in different periods of Chinese that we have mentioned above is that they also developed into passive markers: this includes verbs from a variety of sources such as yŭ 與, qĭ 乞 (chī 吃) 'to give', jiào 叫 'to call', 'to tell' (or jiào 教 'to teach', 'to instruct'), ràng 讓 'to yield', and even zhuó 著 (着), according to Wu (1996). Only shĭ 使 'to send', 'to use' and lìng 令 'to command', attested as causatives as early as Archaic Chinese (Wei 2000), did not develop a passive use, though they continue to function as causative verbs in contemporary Mandarin, and other dialect groups, not to mention in Early Southern Min (see Chappell 2000, Lien 1999. 9 Wu hypothesizes that the passive use of zhuó 著(着) comes from one of its fully lexical verb meanings of 'to suffer'. ...
... In this main section, presenting the syntactic and semantic analysis of causative verbs in Early Southern Min, three verbs are examined: These are (i) khit 4 乞 'to give', 'to beg' whose counterpart is qĭ in standard Mandarin and whose historical development was briefly described in §3.3 above. Qĭ has lost both causative and passive functions in contemporary Mandarin but retains them in many Min dialects (Chappell 2000). (ii) su 2 使 'to cause', 'to send' whose counterpart in standard Mandarin is shĭ and whose historical development was also outlined in §3.3 above. ...
... In contemporary Mandarin, yŭ 與 was eventually replaced by gĕi 給 'to give'. Most pertinent for this study is the fact that khit 4 is the preposition used for the postverbal dative constructions shown in (ii) and (iii) (see Chappell, 2000). Thus, when khit 4 is used in preverbal position, in a structure like (iv), it acts as either a causative verb or a passive marker. ...
... Contemporary Min dialects similarly continue to use cognate forms of 共 go ng as their main comitative markers, expressing the comitative 'with' and connective 'and' meanings. Relevant for the present analysis, they also use it as their object marker (for descriptions, see Chen 1998;Chappell, 2000;Lien, 2002 andTsao 2003 among others). 22 It could in fact be seen as a typological feature of the Min dialects, distinguishing them from other Sinitic languages, particularly in the case of Eastern or Coastal Min (see Norman 1987 for the classification of Min). ...
... The term 'dative' is thus used in its extended sense, since câng in 16 th century Southern Min is clearly not used as the preposition for dative constructions of transferral where the main verb is a verb of giving. This is the province of 乞 khit < 'give' (see Chappell 2000, Lien 2005). ...
... 跟 kai 55 in Waxiang and 共 go ng in Southern Min 6.6. Object marker with monotransitive verbs Several recent treatments of 共 go ng in Min dialects show that it has a similar function to the 把 bă construction in Mandarin where it marks a preverbal and typically referential direct object and co-occurs with a transitive action verb; for example, see Cheng & Tsao (1995), Chappell (2000) and Tsao (1991Tsao ( , 2003 on Southern Min and Chen (1998Chen ( , 2006 (Lien 2002:203) The use of 共 câng to unequivocally mark a patient was not found in either of the early 17 th century missionary texts, nor in our two versions of the Lì Jìng Jì. 33 Neither was it present in the related Fuzhou dialect before the first half of the 20 th century in the case of its cognate marker, according to Chen (2006) (see below for a rapid sketch on the uses of 共 go ng in the Fuzhou dialect). ...
... Crosslinguistic studies show that comitatives frequently develop into instrumentals and manner adverbials and even ergative and possessive markers (Stolz, Stroh & Urdze 2006). In addition to these new functions, in certain branches of the Sinitic languages, comitatives may also develop into object markers, thus showing a special pathway that is less well-documented in other language families (see Chappell 2000 for an early discussion of this source in Southern Min). Nonetheless, Stolz et al (2006: 30-31) view this source as exceptional, citing only the case of Portuguese creoles whose comitative preposition is described as marking object NPs high on the animacy hierarchy. ...
... As just observed, a widespread phenomenon in a majority of the Min languages is for their main vernacular object marker to be polysemous with the comitative preposition kaŋ 7 which is related to an earlier adverb 'together', derived itself from a verb 'to share', 'to accompany' (Chappell 2000;Chappell, Peyraube & Wu 2011). Depending on the variety of Min Chinese, the morpheme has lost its final nasal coda and been reduced to ka 7 , as is clearly the case in Taiwanese Southern Min. ...
... The following is from a Folk Story she collected called The Three Measures in which the first OM is a compound form that combines two borrowed forms, pa 53-35 tsiaŋ 33 , the latter being the more literary form of the two, and the second OM is kai 55-11 . To conclude this section, the four main types of OM construction are presented in tabular form below: In Chappell (2000 and in Chappell, Peyraube & Wu (2011), the following pathway of reanalysis for comitative prepositions into optional object markers has been put forward: This viewpoint is defended with historical data from Southern Min 17th century missionary texts in the Zhangzhou dialect of Southern Min, and from folk operas from the Ming (1379-1644) and Qing dynasties . In the latter texts, the lyrics are composed in both the Quanzhou and Chaozhou varieties of this subgroup, depending on the character role played in the opera. ...
This study sets out to discuss the evolution from oblique to core cases as the source of an overtly-marked nominative-accusative alignment in Sinitic languages. This is due to the emergence of a type of ‘optional’ marking on preverbal direct objects in a construction type that has become widespread in Sinitic. In particular, we examine spoken discourse data from Taiwanese Southern Min whose comitative preposition, ka7, has grammaticalized into an optional object marker. It is argued that this marker is undergoing morphologization into a direct object index (DOI) on the main verb in the predicate, subsequent to the omission of the resumptive pronoun it governs. The new index takes over this function of cross-referencing the lexical direct object, typically located in the immediately preceding discourse, if not in clause-initial position.
In an epilogue, I also briefly treat the evolution of local cases such as the allative and the perlative to optional object markers in the Southern Min languages of Shantou and Jieyang, situated in Guangdong province, China. Both of these are extremely rare sources in the Sinitic family, yet common in Tibeto-Burman and Romance languages. The approach adopted is clearly in harmony with recent diachronic studies which target source morphosyntax in order to explain the emergence of a variety of synchronic patterns, all bearing similar discourse and grammatical functions (Cristofaro & Zúñiga 2018).
KEYWORDS: optional object marking, Southern Min, Sinitic, comitative, nominative-accusative alignment, case, topic
... Ka has no fixed meaning. Even though Wei (1997) argues that the source of ka is unclear, Chappell (2000) proposes that ka originates from cang (共) 'with', which has weakened into ka in form. Ka may introduce the patient as in (40), benefactive as in (41), goal as in (42), and source as in (43) (Teng 1982). ...
... ' 9. Among the four functions of ka, Chappell (2000) argues that cang in the 17th century also can introduce benefactive, goal, and source. ...
... .Chappell (2000) has noted that when ka introduces a benefactive, the benefactive is not subcategorized for by the verb. ...
This paper aims to investigate both Fagerli’s (2001) proposal that in serializing languages benefactive and malefactive constructions often involve the morpheme denoting ‘give’, and Radetzky & Smith’s (2010) proposal that East and South Asian languages often involve different morphemes or structures in expressing benefaction or malefaction. Checking the proposals against benefactive and malefactive constructions in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) which involve optional benefactee and malefactee, this paper shows that both proposals find only partial support from TSM data. TSM uses the morpheme denoting ‘give’, i.e. hoo, in the malefactive construction involving optional malefactee, but not the benefactive construction involving optional benefactee, which involves the use of ka. Moreover, ka can also be used for introducing the malefactive. Even though the hoo malefactive construction and the ka benefactive construction have different structures, the constructions involving ka, no matter whether denoting benefaction or malefaction, have the same syntactic structure.
... figuration: NP 1(Agent) – Object Marker –NP 2(Patient ) –VP, where the object marker is a preposition. While this marker is typically 把 bă in most of the Northern Sinitic area, an array of forms is found in the other main dialect groups belonging to Sinitic. It creates a strong contrast to one of the basic word orders in Chinese languages of S–V–O. Chappell (2000 Chappell ( , 2006 Chappell ( , 2007) has carried out research on this topic for contemporary Sinitic languages in order to examine the diversity of lexical sources as well as the evolution of these object markers. According to her study, there are three main sources for object markers in Sinitic languages. These are the following (Chapp ...
... Contemporary Min dialects similarly continue to use cognate forms of 共 go ng as their main comitative markers, expressing the comitative 'with' and connective 'and' meanings. Relevant for the present analysis, they also use it as their object marker (for descriptions, see Chen 1998; Chappell, 2000; Lien, 2002 In this section, we examine data from historical materials on Southern Min from the early 17 th century, which clearly show the polysemy of the comitative marker 共 go ng. 25 Apart from Mandarin and written genres of Chinese such as Classical Chinese and old orMedieval vernacular documents, Southern Min presents a rare opportunity for diachronic research, since historical data is available that dates back to four centuries ago. Three main texts have been examined for this purpose. ...
... The term 'dative' is thus used in its extended sense, since câng in 16 th century Southern Min is clearly not used as the preposition for dative constructions of transferral where the main verb is a verb of giving. This is the province of 乞 khit < 'give' (see Chappell 2000, Lien 2005). ...
... 8 What is interesting to observe about most of the causative verbs used in different periods of Chinese that we have mentioned above is that they also developed into passive markers: this includes verbs from a variety of sources such as yŭ 與, qĭ 乞 (chī 吃) 'to give', jiào 叫 'to call', 'to tell' (or jiào 教 'to teach', 'to instruct'), ràng 讓 'to yield', and even zhuó 著 (着), according to Wu (1996). Only shĭ 使 'to send', 'to use' and lìng 令 'to command', attested as causatives as early as Archaic Chinese (Wei 2000), did not develop a passive use, though they continue to function as causative verbs in contemporary Mandarin, and other dialect groups, not to mention in Early Southern Min (see Chappell 2000, Lien 1999. 9 Wu hypothesizes that the passive use of zhuó 著(着) comes from one of its fully lexical verb meanings of 'to suffer'. ...
... In this main section, presenting the syntactic and semantic analysis of causative verbs in Early Southern Min, three verbs are examined: These are (i) khit 4 乞 'to give', 'to beg' whose counterpart is qĭ in standard Mandarin and whose historical development was briefly described in §3.3 above. Qĭ has lost both causative and passive functions in contemporary Mandarin but retains them in many Min dialects (Chappell 2000). (ii) su 2 使 'to cause', 'to send' whose counterpart in standard Mandarin is shĭ and whose historical development was also outlined in §3.3 above. ...
... In contemporary Mandarin, yŭ 與 was eventually replaced by gĕi 給 'to give'. Most pertinent for this study is the fact that khit 4 is the preposition used for the postverbal dative constructions shown in (ii) and (iii) (see Chappell, 2000). Thus, when khit 4 is used in preverbal position, in a structure like (iv), it acts as either a causative verb or a passive marker. ...
This study of Early Modern Southern Min examines issues in the grammaticalization of its analytic causative constructions and sets out to explain the apparent singleton status of su3賜 ‘bestow’ as a causative verb in the history of Chinese.
The three main causative constructions in Southern Min, as attested in 16th and 17th centuries documents, are formed on the basis of lexical verbs belonging to the semantic field of either ‘give’ or ‘cause’. These have been grammaticalized into causative function as V¬1 in complex clauses of the type:
NPCauser + V¬1[causative] + NP¬causee + V2 + (NP…)
The main source for the data is the Southern Min translation of the Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua china (ca. 1607) which we compare with the contemporaneous Lì Jīng Jì荔鏡記 [Romance of the Litchi Mirror] (1566, 1581), a Ming dynasty play written in a mixture of Quanzhou and Chaozhou dialects. A brief diachronic outline of causatives is also provided within a typological perspective.
... They have been extensively used by scholars to investigate the history of the Southern Min grammar (e.g. Yue-Hashimoto, 1991;Yue, 1999;Chappell, 2000;Lien, 2002Lien, , 2005Lien, , 2011Lien, , 2015bLien, , 2020Zeng and Li, 2013;Lai, 2019;Lü, 2019). ...
... Southern Min textbooks used to be compiled with Romanized texts as guidance for Westerners, especially the missionaries. For example, Chappell (2000) has used Zhāngzhōu Huà Yǔfǎ漳州話語法Arte de la Lengua Chio Chiu (1620), a Southern Min grammar book for Spanish missionaries, to analyze the history of the dative, causative and passive constructions in Southern Min. In this current study, three Southern Min textbooks, i.e. ...
This paper studies the evolution of a unique potential complement construction (PCC), i.e. V-MOD/MODNEG-C, in Min, a southeastern Chinese dialect group. Based on Southern Min historical materials, the Min PCC is observed to have emerged in the late 19th century and, with its higher compositionality, accessibility and universality, renewed the preexisting mainstream Chinese PCC, i.e. V-PRT/NEG-C, in the 20th century. In modern Min dialects, the Min PCC evolves into three types of allostructions (i.e. morphosyntactic variants), which can be accounted for by directionality at the universal, language-specific, and category-specific levels. The emergence of the Min PCC and its allostructions has increased the schematicity of the Chinese PCC hierarchy.
... With respect to Sinitic languages, Liu and Peyraube (1994), Wu Fuxiang 吴福祥 (2003) and Chappell (2000Chappell ( , 2006 all discuss the grammaticalization pathways of comitatives, using different perspectives. In Liu and Peyraube (1994), the central hypothesis is as follows: coordinative conjunctions in contemporary Mandarin (tóng 同, hé 和 and gēn 跟, all meaning 'and', 'with') do not directly evolve out of verbs but from prepositions, themselves are derived from verbs . ...
... The first pathway is found in languages where the comitative precedes the verb while the second is found in languages where the comitative follows. Chappell (2000Chappell ( , 2006 reveals a completely new pathway of grammaticalization for comitatives: comitative > accusative. None of the studies mentioned above describes this unusual pathway found in a subset of Sinitic languages, where the comitative marker has developed into a full-fledged marker of the direct object. ...
China possesses rich linguistic resources which remain relatively untapped: the ten main Sinitic languages or dialect groups account for roughly 93% of the population (Mandarin, Jin, Xiang, Gan, Hui, Wu, Min, Kejia, Yue, and Pinghua); the remaining 7% comprise the many different "minority" languages in long term contact with Sinitic such as Tibeto-Burman, Mongolian, Hmong, and Tai. In an almost unprecedented state of affairs, written records for Chinese extend without a break 3,000 years into the past, furnishing a rich documentation for any kind of historical study.
... Li (1950), Ong (1957, 1982), Wu (1987), Yang (1991) and Zhou (1992) recognized these semantic functions in the postwar period as well. But it was not until Teng (1982 Teng ( , 1995), Tsao and Lu (1990), Hung (1995), Cheng (1998) and Chappell (2000) that detailed and more in-depth studies were made in the framework of modern linguistics. ...
... A question presents itself as to when it was borrowed into Min groups, and it has to be left for future endeavor. 26 24 See Loon (1966 Loon ( , 1967), Yue (1999) and Chappell (2000) ...
The paper examines semantic roles that function words khit4
乞, thoo3 度, kang7 共, kah4 ㆙, chiong1 將 and liah8 力 each
impose on the following noun and their syntactic properties in Li4
Jing4 Ji4 荔鏡記. A scrutiny of the development of these function
words in four Southern Min dialects shows both conservatism and
innovation. 共 and 將 are uniformly inherited, whereas 乞 is
retained in Jinjiang 晉江 and Jieyang 揭陽, but not in Longxi 龍
溪 and Xiamen 廈門, and 度 is only kept in Jinjiang. Hoo7 互* is
a new development in Longxi and Xiamen. It is quite instructive to
compare the different strategies by which to represent the semantic
roles of function words graphically. Japanese scholars in the prewar
period make it a practice to use different characters to mark
divergent semantic roles, whereas Chinese scholars in the post-war
period tend to use the same character even though different
semantic roles are involved. The different behavior is closely linked
to their linguistic intuition and their language pattern, and it shows
the covert nature of coding in Chinese. Interpretation of Chinese
sentences is in large part context-dependent and driven by
pragmatic information. Constructions also contribute partially to its
sentential meaning.
... Making reference to world and cultural knowledge, verbs are used to refer to conceptual structures. For instance, Fillmore & Atkins (1992, 2000 demonstrate how frames can explicitly describe and motivate the various senses associated with risk and crawl. ...
... Liu & Peyraube (1994), citing diachronic data, propose that several conjunctions in contemporary Mandarin (including ji, yu, gong, he, tong, gen) have involved two steps of grammaticalization -one transforming a verb into a preposition, and subsequently the other developing the preposition into a conjunction. In a similar vein, Cheng & Tsao (1995), and Chappell (2000), documenting data from earlier texts and sub-dialects in Taiwanese Southern Min, maintain that the conjunction function of ka evolves from its comitative preposition function. In section 3.1, LAU was claimed to have been decategorized from a verb denoting 'to mix' into a preposition denoting 'together-with'. ...
With regard to the meaning relatedness of the multiple grammatical and semantic functions associated with LAU, this study has the following proposals. First, it is claimed that LAU undergoes a two-step grammaticalization process, decategorizing from a verb to a preposition and subsequently into a conjunction. Along with the structural decategorization process, LAU extends its predicate meaning denoting to mix to its comitative preposition meaning denoting together-with, and then into conjunction meaning and. Second, it is argued that through the mechanism of metonymic strengthening and underspecification of participant roles in an event frame, each of the various senses can be induced given appropriate context. Specifically, the goal sense is strengthened through the implied inference of the comitative sense when the predicate is a verb of communication. The source sense, which denotes the opposite direction of the goal, comes out of an event frame that involves predicates of taking away. Then both the goal sense and the source sense can feed the emergence of the benefactive sense. Finally, two alternative paths are proposed to account for the emergence of the patient sense —either from the source sense or from the benefactive sense. Henceforth, the meaning extension of these different semantic functions associated with Hakka LAU is accounted for plausibly.
... Lakoff (1971: 158) finds ambiguities in the agency of an English halve-or get-causative also; for example, she believes that a sentence such as John had his dishes washed, like John got his dishes washed, is three-ways ambiguous between signifying an adversative passive (with an unexpressed agent), a causative sense, and an achievement (succeeded in washing them). The Iatter interpretation might apply more to the get-causative than to the havecausative , and it is a similar causative meaning which has been claimed to be that most closely associated with transitive ha-sentences (see Huang, 1974; Chappell, 1991); i.e. the agent is the subject of ha. In actual fact, the semantics of all of Lakoff's example do not indicate anything more than the abstract possession by the subject of a completed act. ...
... In other words, there is no available parallel evidence of cases of 'split' (Heine and Reh, 1984) or 'divergence' (Hopper, 1991 ) in which the verb itself might have developed a possessive meaning prior to its use in serial constructions and continued to be used with such meaning alongside the grammaticalising functions, in the same way as, for example, have in English developed a possessive meaning prior to grammaticalisation to an aspectual auxiliary. The use of ba as a lexical form now is restricted to a few frozen nominal and verbal compounds (as well as a classifier), in which it retains the former senses of 'hold' or 'grasp' (see, e.g., Chappell, 1991). Given that the original lexical use of ba is virtually obsolete, one would not expect to find metonymic shifts evolving in the meaning of the lexical form outside the ba construction (as in (15) ) since the frequency of use of the item in serial constructions would indicate a greater likelihood of semantic weakening. ...
The role of the co-verb ba in Mandarin Chinese has been one of the most frequently researched areas of investigation, previous analyses referring to notions such as disposal, definiteness, and high transitivity to describe its present grammatical status. However, historical accounts appear to give insufficient attention to the development of resultivity or telicity in the ba-complement. In order to explain these constraints, the present study offers an analysis of the ba-construction an instance of the grammaticalisation of causativity from lexical sources of dynamic possession (Heine, 1997). The possession-based analysis also explains the frequent substitution by gei in some dialects, and justifies the continued adherence to an SVO syntactic explanation.
... However, comparative analyses between typologically and genealogically distinct languages have been largely underrepresented (cf. Matisoff 1992, Dressler & Barbaresi 1994, Chappell 2000, Ponsonnet 2018, and this research intends to fill this gap, with an isolating Kra-Dai language (Thai) and an agglutinating Transeurasian language (Korean). ...
Lexemes denoting ‘small’ typically undergo a range of semantic or functional extension, either as free-standing lexical forms, or weakly-grammaticalized derivational morphemes, or even fully grammatical forms (such as classifiers). There is a body of literature analyzing diminutives in individual languages and across languages. However, comparative analyses between typologically and genealogically distinct languages have been largely underrepresented. This research analyzes an isolating, Kra-Dai language (Thai) and an agglutinating, Transeurasian language (South Korean). A comparative analysis reveals that the smallness concept in Thai forms an elaborate conceptual network in five major domains, i.e., YOUNG and LOWER DEGREE, SMALL SIZE, LOW DENSITY, and LOW CONFIGURATIONAL COMPLEXITY; whereas the South Korean network involves WEAK and INFERIOR, NON-HUMAN, MEMBER, and PARTIAL. Semantic extension directionalities in Thai and South Korean diminutive lexemes exhibit certain similarities and also a number of differences in the motivating inference patterns, e.g., ‘small therefore cute’ in Thai and ‘small therefore contemptible’ in South Korean. in particular. Thai diminutives lean toward the more neutral or positive meanings, whereas South Korean diminutives lean toward the largely negative and pejorative meanings including animal and animal body-part naming. Drawing upon corpus data, this paper examines the conceptual extension patterns behind the evaluative morphopragmatics of diminutives from crosslinguistic and grammaticalization perspectives.
... Matthews and Yip 2008;Chappell 2013Chappell , 2015. As an illustration, Southern Min uses not only the common disposal construction (2), but also the disposal construction with clause initial object and its resumptive pronoun introduced by the disposal marker (3) and hybrid disposal construction with two disposal markers (4); in addition to the TAKE/HOLD verb tsiɔŋ 1 (which is more often used in formal registers), cognates of the comitative ka 5 commonly serve as a disposal marker in various varieties of Southern Min (Chappell 2000). ...
This study examines the use of various types of disposal constructions in the Chenghai dialect of Chaoshan Southern Min. Based on the distinction between head-marking and dependent-marking grammar, we identify four types of disposal constructions, depending on the position of the marker. We performed the fruit cart task to elicit disposal constructions from 30 native speakers of this dialect. Our results indicate that zero-marking is the most dominant construction type, where topicalization represents the most common subtype; this observation is in line with Southern Min's strong tendency towards topicalized structures. Nonetheless, despite its dominance at present, the frequency of this construction type increases with age, which suggests that it may be losing ground. Notably, according to our preliminary observation, another topicalized structure in Chenghai Southern Min also seems falling into disfavour, suggesting that the declining use of topicalization in this Chaoshan dialect may be systemic.
... Passives are constructed with verbs of giving, predominantly khit 8 乞, but with hou 7 與 in the Taiwanese and Xiamen dialects (Chappell 2000). A special feature of Min dialects is the use of ka 7~k ang 7 共 as the marker of the disposal construction which comes from a comitative preposition meaning 'with, for' (Li & Chappell 2013a, b;Chappell 2013). ...
China is a vast country with a population currently approaching 1.4 billion, yet not all these people speak Mandarin, nor necessarily any other form of Chinese. At least 8% of the population belong to one of the 56 recognized ethnic minorities, each of which by the standards of any European country would represent a small nation in its own right. For example, there are an estimated 14.9 million speakers of the Tai languages, known as Zhuàng 壯in China, who are principally located in the Guangxi Autonomous Region in south China, 2.7 million speakers of Korean, and 8.4 million speakers of the Uyghur language in Xinjiang (Lewis et al. 2014).
In this description, we will concentrate on describing the Sinitic languages of China spoken by the other 91% of the population. ‘Sinitic’ is the technical term used in linguistics to refer to Chinese languages and dialects which are as different from one another as the languages of Europe are, as Romanian is from Portuguese. The Sinitic languages are historically related to the Tibeto-Burman languages, together forming the large Sino-Tibetan language family which is spread over most of East Asia in addition to many areas of Southeast Asia.
... The Dutch also made its presence felt in publishing a bulky dictionary of Dutch-Hokkienese (Chiang-chiu) (Schlegel, 1886(Schlegel, --1890. Such texts provide an important foundation for undertaking theoretical research (Yue, 1991and Chappell, 2000, among many others). The early part of the 20th century entered a new phase of intense interest in the indigenous languages of Taiwan shortly after Japan began its rule of Taiwan. ...
拍 phah⁴ comes in various flavors in Taiwanese Southern Min. It is taken as a manifestation of various types of little v above the verb. It may be the functional head of causatives in alternation with unaccusatives. However, when coupled with some negative phrases it yields anti-causatives expressing adversity meaning. 拍 phah⁴ is also instrumental in forming antipassives and even developing scalar adjectives modifiable by degree adverbs. The teasing out of the chameleon 拍 phah⁴ construed as three kinds of little v in bringing causatives, anti-causatives and antipassives in Taiwanese Southern Min aims to deepen our understanding of its syntactic behavior and semantic interpretation from a cross-linguistic perspective.
... 6 The homeland of the Min dialects is the southeastern province of Fujian in China, from where migrations down the coast to Guangdong province and across the straits to Taiwan, as well as to many areas of Southeast Asia, spread varieties of Min further afield from the time of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, that is, from 16 th -17 th centuries. The language of the Arte most likely represents a koine of Southern Min dialects spoken in the south of Fujian during the 16 th and 17th centuries (Yue-Hashimoto 1998, Chappell 2000, Chappell & Peyraube 2006, Klöter 2011 . The place name, Chiõ Chiu, reflects the Hokkien pronunciation for the city of Zhangzhou (or Changchow) 漳州, according to historical sources such as Klaproth & Clerc de Landresse (1839), Phillips (1892), but also van der Loon (1967: 97) and Klöter (2011: 3, 159-162). ...
This article evaluates the scientific contribution of western scholars and missionaries in the compilation of a large number of descriptive grammars for Chinese languages which appeared during the period from the late 16th to the early 20th centuries. This is all the more interesting, given that the native tradition of grammatical studies only began to develop at a very late period in China’s history, the first real grammar being published in 1898. This was the Mă shì wén tōng 馬氏文通 by Ma Jianzhong, a scholar who had gained a western education while studying in Paris. Through this he became familiar with some of the main European intellectual trends in linguistics, which contrasted with the traditional study of rhetoric and philology.
After a presentation of the main grammars of Chinese languages produced by Europeans during this period, the aptness of their theoretical frameworks is tested by analysing the treatment of the numeral classifier, a part of speech not found in European languages. The reasons for the prolonged lack of any theoretical interest in grammar, revealed in the native Chinese linguistic tradition, is speculated upon in an epilogue.
... Passives are constructed with verbs of giving, predominantly khit 8 乞, but with hou 7 與 in the Taiwanese and Xiamen dialects (Chappell 2000). A special feature of Min dialects is the use of ka 7~k ang 7 共 as the marker of the disposal construction which comes from a comitative preposition meaning 'with, for' (Li & Chappell 2013a, b;Chappell 2013). ...
... 5 The homeland of the Min dialects is the south-eastern province of Fujian in China, from where migrations down the coast to Guangdong province and across the straits to Taiwan, as well as to many areas of South-East Asia, spread varieties of Min further afield from the time of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, that is, from sixteenth-seventeenth centuries. The language of the Arte most likely represents a koine of Southern Min dialects spoken in the south of Fujian during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Yue-Hashimoto, 1998;Chappell, 2000;Chappell & Peyraube, 2006;Klöter, 2011). 6 The place name, Chiõ Chiu, reflects the Hokkien pronunciation for the city of Zhangzhou (or Changchow) 漳州, according to historical sources such as Klaproth & Clerc de Landresse (1839), Phillips (1892), but also van der Loon (1967: 97) and Klöter (2011: 3, 159-62). ...
This article evaluates the scientific contribution of Western scholars and missionaries in the compilation of a large number of descriptive grammars for Chinese languages which appeared during the period from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. This is all the more interesting, given that the native tradition of grammatical studies only began to develop at a very late period in China's history, the first real grammar being published in 1898. This was the Ma shì wén tong by Ma Jianzhong, a scholar who had gained a Western education while studying in Paris and was therefore broadly familiar with some of the main European intellectual traditions in linguistics, as well as the Chinese ones, concerned above all with rhetoric and philology. After a presentation of the main grammars of Chinese languages produced by Europeans during this period, the aptness of their theoretical frameworks is tested by analysing the treatment of the numeral classifier, a part of speech not found in European languages. The reasons for the prolonged lack of any theoretical interest in grammar, revealed in the native Chinese linguistic tradition, is speculated upon in an epilogue.
... 8. For studies on the grammaticalization of GIVE in standard Mandarin, the Cantonese dialects and the Min dialects, see Newman (1993), Chin (2009b) and Chappell (2000) respectively. ...
This paper proposes that there are two types of indirect object markers in the Chinese language: The go-type and the give-type. The chronological development of these two types of indirect object markers will be discussed. Moreover, with reference to the Cantonese dialects, this paper will examine the factors contributing to the replacement of the go-type marker by the give-type marker. Finally, this typology of the indirect object markers is discussed from an areal linguistic perspective.
... However, previous studies of Cantonese [pei 35 ] 畀 focus mainly on the double object construction, particularly on the relative word order of the direct and indirect objects (see, for example, Cheung 1972Cheung [2007, Peyraube 1981, Matthews & Yip 1994, Tang 1998, Yue-Hashimoto 1993, Lam 2008. Little attention however has been paid to the various syntactic functions performed by [pei 35 ] 畀, although there have been a number of studies of the syntactic functions of give in other dialects such as Modern Standard Chinese in Zhu (1979) which focuses only on the functions of indirect object and beneficiary markers and the Southern Min dialects (see Cheng 1974, Cheng et al. 1999, Chappell 2000, Chappell & Peyraube 2006. This paper will examine the relationship between [pei 35 ] 畀 and the five syntactic functions mentioned above in terms of grammaticalization, which is defined by Heine & Kuteva (2002:2) as "the development [of morphemes] from lexical to grammatical forms and from grammatical to even more grammatical forms". ...
This paper examines five syntactic functions performed by the double object verb [pei 35 ] 畀 (meaning 'to give') in the Cantonese dialects: (a) Indirect object marker; (b) beneficiary marker; (c) causative verb; (d) passive marker; and (e) instrument marker. It will, through cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal comparison, show how these functions are related to the double object verb as a result of grammaticalization which involves a number of semantic and cognitive processes such as desemanticization, decategorialization, and semantic-pragmatic inferencing. The grammaticalization paths and the chronological development of these functions of [pei 35 ] 畀 will also be examined on the basis of synchronic and diachronic data from Cantonese. Finally, the multifunctionality of give found in some non-Sinitic languages spoken in China and the Southeast Asian linguistic area will be discussed from an areal perspective.
提要
本文考察新近整理、刊行的三本17世纪 “西班牙语-闽南语” 文献, 辅以19世纪罗马字语料和21世纪共时调查结果, 以相互间隔两百年的三个连续时间段描写、比较多功能词 “共” “合” 在漳州方言的用法, 从历时角度探讨其语法功能叠置特征和竞争演变状态。研究表明, 类同于音韵层次叠置现象, 漳州方言多功能词 “共” “合” 因功能叠置而在历时上发生竞争, 从功能叠置走向功能互补, 演变特点差异显著。 “共” “合” 在漳州方言中的分布与演变可为两者在其他地区闽南方言中的关系提供参考, 亦为历史层次分析理论作用于语法领域提供实例论证。
This study sets out to discuss the evolution from oblique to core case as a manifestation of overtly-marked nominative-accusative alignment in Sinitic languages. This is due to the emergence of a type of ‘optional’ marking on preverbal direct objects in a construction type that has become widespread in Sinitic ( Chappell & Verstraete 2019 ). In particular, I examine spoken discourse data from Taiwanese Southern Min whose comitative preposition, ka ⁷ , has grammaticalized into an optional object marker. It is argued that this marker is undergoing morphologization into a direct object index ( doi ) on the main verb in the predicate, subsequent to the omission of the resumptive pronoun it governs. The new index takes over this function of cross-referencing the lexical direct object, typically located in the immediately preceding discourse, if not in clause-initial position.
In an epilogue, I also briefly treat the evolution of local cases such as the allative and the perlative to optional object markers in the Southern Min languages of Shantou and Jieyang, situated in Guangdong Province, China. Both of these are extremely rare sources in the Sinitic family, yet common in Tibeto-Burman and Romance languages. The approach adopted is in harmony with recent diachronic studies which target source morphosyntax in order to explain the emergence of a variety of synchronic patterns, all bearing similar discourse and grammatical functions ( Cristofaro & Zúñiga 2018 ).
（English below)
本文在介绍17 世纪到20 世纪初西方学与传教士所编撰的大批汉语描写性语法书的基础上，评介他 们的贡献。集中分析西方学 对量词这一欧洲语言中不存在的词类的处理， 讨论其理论框架的优劣。本文还分析了在中国本土语言学传统中，对语法理论的关注度长期不足的原因。
关键： 汉语，语法 ， 量词，中国， 西方
This paper evaluates the contributions of a large number of descriptive grammars for Chinese languages compiled by Western scholars and missionaries from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It not only focuses on the treatment by Western scholars of the numeral classifier, a part of speech not found in European languages, but
also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the different theoretical frameworks. In addition, the paper analyzes the reasons for the prolonged lack of any theoretical interest in grammar revealed in the native Chinese linguistic tradition.
Key words: Chinese; grammar; classifier; China; the Occident
Wu (2003) investigated a number of coordinative conjunctions and stated that the
coordinative conjunctions in Chinese were developed through the grammaticalization
path: verb > comitative preposition > coordinative conjunction. Liu and Peyraube
(1994) studied the historical texts from pre-Qin to Song Dynasties and they reached
the same conclusion as Wu (2003). Liu (2003), however, argued that the coordinative
conjunction taʔ 5 搭 in the Wu dialect was grammaticalized directly from the verb.
Despite that research has been carried out to investigate the use of coordinative
conjunctions in Chinese dialects and classical Chinese, none of the previous research
mentioned the situation in the Yue dialect. This present research aims at
reconstructing the grammaticalization path of the coordinative conjunctions in several
varieties of Yue as spoken in the Guangdong Province. The grammaticalization
processes observed in Yue are to be compared with those in other Chinese dialects.
Three findings are obtained in this study (i) The coordinative conjunctions in
Guangdong Yue were developed from two possible grammaticalization paths, of
which Path II is not observed in other Chinese dialects. Path I: verb > comitative
preposition > coordinative conjunction (for animate nouns) > coordinative
conjunction (for all nouns) > coordinative conjunction (for all nouns and adjectives)
Path II: verb > coordinative conjunction (for adjectives) > coordinative conjunction (for all nouns and adjectives) (ii) For those lexical items from which the coordinative
conjunctions in Chinese dialects were developed, there is a tendency that they share
similar semantic properties, named as ‘physical proximity’, and (iii) two implicational
hierarchies were observed in Chinese dialects, namely comitative > allative > ablative
> locative, and comitative > allative > benefactive.
This analysis includes a description of language contact phenomena such as stratification, hybridization and convergence for Sinitic languages. It also presents typologically unusual grammatical features for Sinitic such as double patient constructions, negative existential constructions and agentive adversative passives, while tracing the development of complementizers and diminutives and demarcating the extent of their use across Sinitic and the Sinospheric zone. Both these kinds of data are then used to explore the issue of the adequacy of the comparative method to model linguistic relationships inside and outside of the Sinitic family. It is argued that any adequate explanation of language family formation and development needs to take into account these different kinds of evidence (or counter-evidence) in modeling genetic relationships. In §1 the application of the comparative method to Chinese is reviewed, closely followed by a brief description of the typological features of Sinitic languages in §2. The main body of this chapter is contained in two final sections: §3 discusses three main outcomes of language contact, while §4 investigates morphosyntactic features that evoke either the North-South divide in Sinitic or areal diffusion of certain features in Southeast and East Asia as opposed to grammaticalization pathways that are crosslinguistically common
This is an experimental study of the frequency of formal passive and disposal marking in five Chinese dialects - Beijing Mandarin, Taipei Mandarin, Guangzhou Vue, Shanghai Wu and Taiwan Southern Min. Using oral stories and oral responses, we observe whether usage frequency is dialect-specific or is relatively uniform throughout. The results provide a rather nuanced view of 'Pan-Chinese' grammar, i.e. the usual distinction of Northern vs. Southern dialects is not fully predictive of the relative frequency at which the passive and disposal functions are formally marked.
Ka 7construction in Taiwan Southern Min is divided into referential and non-referential, according to the referentiality of the ka 7 NP. At D-structure, the referential ka 7 construction has ka 7 as a head verb which subcategorizes for an NP and a passivized V P. In the non-referential ka 7construction, the phrase consisting of ka 7 plus NP is an adjunct. This proposal is supported by considerable supporting evidence, i.e. the deletion of the ka 7-phrase, the addition of an extra disposal marker, and the movement of the ka 7 NP. The referential ka 7construction can be further divided into adversative and non-adversative, depending on whether ka 7 takes VP or IP as its complement.
In this study, I argue that the experiential aspect marker in Sinitic languages should be reclassified as an evidential marker based on its semantic characteristics. The analysis shows that the relevant marker in each Sinitic language is used to express the speaker os commitment to the truth of the proposition, specifically, certainty about prior occurrence of an event in its core use. Furthermore, this is founded on either direct observation or knowledge, if not an inference from an observable result state which is made by the speaker.1 On the basis of data from eight Chinese languages, I first discuss why the experiential aspect is, in essence, an evidential marker; next, I outline the two main paths of grammaticalization in Sinitic languages; and finally, I address core and non-core semantic features as a reflection of morphosyntactic and semantic variation within Sinitic languages. I use the framework of prototype theory to analyse the evidential in terms of a radial category (Jurafsky 1997). This is the first study to analyse this grammatical category in Sinitic languages as a whole.
This paper examines the origins and grammatical properties of a preposition in Chinese Pidgin English - long - which has not received much discussion. The significance of long is that it is highly multifunctional and semantically versatile. Long is used to indicate a range of semantic roles: comitative, benefactive, malefactive and source. A second function of long is to mark coordination. It will be shown that a substantial part of the syntax and semantics of long can be attributed to substrate transfer of a corresponding Cantonese morpheme tung4 'with'. The creation of long does not conform to the traditional thesis of simply taking the phonetic form from the lexifier language and deriving the grammar from the substrate language. It will be argued that the emergence of long is a case of multiple etymologies which involves the recombination of phonological, syntactic and semantic features from both English and Cantonese. Findings from new CPE sources also suggest a need for re-examining the historical connections between CPE and other Pidgin English varieties of the Pacific region.
There are three kinds of kang(7) attested in the sixteenth century and later Southern MM playscripts as well as the Chinese-character and Romanized Southern Min texts compiled by Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth century: (1) kang(7) expressing relationship of co-participation, (2) kang(7) exhibiting a unilateral relationship, and (3) kang(7) showing a co-ordinate relationship. Ka(7) as a reflex of kang(7) is limited to the unilateral relationship construction in modern Taiwanese Southern Min. Thus, there is a lexical replacement by which kang(7) claiming both a co-participation relationship and a co-ordinate relationship in earlier times is replaced by kap(4)/kah(4) or its dialectal variants such as tsham(1), ham(7) and kiau(1) in Taiwanese Southern Min. However, the situation concerning the constructional types claimed by vis-a-vis is somewhat different if we take other modern Southern MM varieties such as Quanzhou, Zhangzhou and Chaozhou into consideration. Quanzhou seems to be more conservative than Zhangzhou and Chaozhou in that kang(7) holds faster to its original domain.
This analysis sets out to specifically discuss the polyfunctionality of 跟[kai55] in Waxiang (Sinitic), whose lexical source is the verb ‘to follow’. Amongst its various uses, we find a preposition ‘with, along’, a marker of adjuncts and a NP conjunction, thus superficially resembling its Mandarin cognate 跟gēn ‘with’. Curiously, however, it has also evolved into a direct object marker in Waxiang, with a function similar to that of the preposition 把bǎ < ‘hold, take’ as found in the S-bǎ-OVP or so-called ‘disposal’ form in standard Mandarin. The pathways of grammaticalization for 跟[kai55] inWaxiang are thus discussed in order to determine how it has developed this unusual grammatical function in one of the linguistic zones of China where verbs of giving or taking are, in fact, the main source for grammaticalized object markers in ‘disposal’ constructions. On the basis of sixteenth and seventeenth century Southern Min literature (Sinitic), a comparison is also made with analogous developments for comitative 共kang
7 (Mandarin gòng) ‘with’ to provide support for our hypothesis that the direct object marking use has evolved from the oblique function of a benefactive or dative, and is clearly separate from the crosslinguistically well-attested pathway that leads to its use as a conjunction. We would thus like to propose that these data contribute a new pattern to the stock of grammaticalization pathways, specifically, comitative > dative/benefactive > accusative (direct object marker).
Recent arguments by Langacker (2003) on the nature of verb meanings in constructions claim that such meanings are created by entrenchment and frequency of use, and only with repeated use can they become conventionalised and acceptable. Such a position raises the need for a diachronic perspective on Construction Grammar. The present paper investigates the evolution of constructions through the example of thehave-causative in English, which appears to have had its origins as a transfer verb in telic argument structure constructions. When the construction contains a transfer verb, construction meaning reinforces verb meaning and periphrastic causatives may grammaticalise as output; this is a gradual development over time. In one way, then, the verbhavegrammaticalises across a succession of constructions, but in another, the telic argument structure construction itself is seen to have a progressive diachronic development.
This paper investigates a set of verb enclitics in Sinitic languages, including Mandarin kuo55, Cantonese Yue kwo33, and Shanghainese Wu ku31 as well as functionally-related preverbal markers in the Min dialects such as Taiwanese bat and Fuzhou peik31 tseing52. These have commonly been described as experiential aspect markers used to indicate that an event has taken place at least once in the past (see, for example, Comrie 1976: 58).
The main purpose of this study is to challenge the view that this category is primarily aspectual in the case of Sinitic languages. After discussion of the syntactic and semantic features of these markers in eight Sinitic languages in terms of prototype theory, I argue that the experiential aspect in Sinitic languages should be reclassified as an evidential marker.
The analysis shows that the relevant marker in each Sinitic language is used to express the speaker’s commitment to the truth of the proposition, namely, certainty about the occurrence of an event. One use of these markers can be classified as a kind of inferential evidential, since the source of information is based on an inference made from an observable result state (cf. Willett 1988: 57). The other use is as an immediate evidential of personally experiencing an event (hence the traditional label). This conditions a person split.
Other non-core uses are also examined such as imperatives of repeatability expressing ‘do a certain event again’, and marking the verb in the protasis of conditionals. Further extensions of meaning for these evidential markers are found in constructions of ‘partial effect’ and as a phase complement marker of completion in Mandarin. It is shown how these are semantically linked with the prototypical meaning through discussion of the grammaticalization process of these markers from two main sources: verbs meaning ‘to cross, pass through’ which are cognate in most Sinitic languages, or verbs meaning ‘to know’ in Min dialects. This is the first study to analyse this grammatical category in Sinitic as a whole.
Researchers on grammatical change are more than often extremely suspicious of the phenomenon of borrowing, which they consider as an undesirably weak explanation. The main reasons against borrowing are that it is unfalsifiable and that the direction and extent of borrowing, if any, as well as the kinds of features affected, are determined more by social factors than by linguistic ones. However, since Wang Li's remark in the 1940s that "the europeanization of (Chinese) grammar has been an event of great consequence in the history of our language," many have tried to contribute arguments in favor of the thesis of a westernization of Chinese grammar. I will argue that these arguments, which often are repetitive, are far from being as convincing as one would like to suppose. The first part of this paper will show that the great majority of the examples put forward as evidence for a europeanization of Chinese grammar were actually in place before any contact between China and the West. In other words, regarding the problem of actuation(origin of the forms), it is suggested that any influence of Western languages on Chinese grammar has been quite limited. In the second part of this paper, however, it will be acknowledged that such an influence could have been important, at least in some registers of language (special kinds of shumianyu), for the implementation (spreading) of the so-called Western structures. The last part of the paper will discuss some universals regarding grammatical changes to borrowing in order to explain why Westernization of Chinese has necessarily been limited.
William S.-Y. Wang (1969) put forward the theory of lexical diffusion in which competing changes of intersecting phonological rules are held to be a cause of residues.1 In Wang and Lien (1993) this theory is further developed and a thesis of bidirectional diffusion in sound change is advanced to provide an explanation for the interaction between a native (and colloquial) stratum and an alien (and literary) stratum. This may develop into a competition between these two strata which can be resolved in favour of either stratum. In this analysis I argue on evidence adduced from Taiwanese Southern Min in support of the thesis of bidirectional diffusion extending beyond phonological change to morphological change. First, I provide a typology of stratificational distinction in terms of the distinctive syllabic features of initial, final, and tone.
Phonological change may be implemented in a manner that is phonetically abrupt but lexically gradual. As the change diffuses across the lexicon, it may not reach all the morphemes to which it is applicable. If there is another change competing for part of the lexicon, residue may result. Several fundamental issues in the theory of phonological change are raised and discussed.
Two languages can resemble each other in the categories, constructions, and types of meaning they use, and in the forms they employ to express these. Such resemblances may be the consequence of universal characteristics of language, of chance or coincidence, of the borrowing by one language of another's words, or of the diffusion of grammatical, phonetic, and phonological characteristics that takes place when languages come into contact. Languages sometimes show likeness because they have borrowed not from each other but from a third language. Languages that come from the same ancestor may have similar grammatical categories and meanings expressed by similar forms: such languages are said to be genetically affiliated. This book considers how and why forms and meanings of different languages at different times may resemble one another. Its editors and authors aim (a) to explain and identify the relationship between areal diffusion and the genetic development of languages, and (b) to discover the means of distinguishing what may cause one language to share the characteristics of another. The introduction outlines the issues that underlie these aims, introduces the chapters which follow, and comments on recurrent conclusions by the contributors. The problems are formidable and the pitfalls numerous: for example, several of the authors draw attention to the inadequacy of the family tree diagram as the main metaphor for language relationship. The authors range over Ancient Anatolia, Modern Anatolia, Australia, Amazonia, Oceania, Southeast and East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The book includes an archaeologist's view on what material evidence offers to explain cultural and linguistic change, and a general discussion of which kinds of linguistic feature can and cannot be borrowed. The chapters are accessibly-written and illustrated by twenty maps. The book will interest all students of the causes and consequences of language change and evolution.
Chinese linguistics has roots which reach far back in time. It is well known that linguistic studies formed the backbone of the disciplines collectively known as xiaoxue J、學, which remained at the core of traditional learning in China until modern times. At about the time that Plato was debating whether language is a social convention or a divine gift, Xunzi 荀子 [b.323 B.C.] was considering the same questions and coming up with similar analyses.1
Studies on syntactic change have indisputably been the poor kin of linguistic research of the 20th century. We habitually make Saussure responsible for this situation: his famous synchrony/diachrony division might have constituted a real epistemological breakthrough, compared to the preceding period (last quarter of the 19th century) which was dominated by the Neogrammarians. But all this is highly uncertain. Saussure himself and European post-Saussurian grammarians have in fact more or less continued the research on diachrony, without reducing it exclusively to the phonological domain. Bloomfield and the American structuralists, on the other hand, have held more strongly to the Saussurian dichotomy as a dogma, creating a tradition to be perpetuated by the different trends ensuing from generative grammar.
Even though Sinitic languages are spoken by more than one billion people, very little research has been carried out on the synchronic grammar of major languages and dialect groups of Chinese, apart from standard Mandarin or pǔtōnghuà 普通话, and Cantonese to a lesser extent. The same situation applies to the diachrony of Sinitic languages with respect to the exact relationship between Archaic and Medieval Chinese and contemporary dialects.
Since diachronic and historical research reveal important insights into earlier stages of grammar and morphology, they cannot but form a crucial link with synchronic studies: First, it can be expected that different kinds of archaic and medieval features are potentially preserved in certain of the more conservative dialect groups of Sinitic. Second, clues to the pathways of grammaticalization and semantic change can only be clearly delineated with reference to precise analyses of earlier stages of the Chinese language. These are two decisive factors in employing both approaches to syntactic research in the one analysis. Indeed, the main motivation behind compiling this volume of studies on the grammar of Sinitic languages (or Chinese dialects) is to highlight the work of linguists who use the two intertwined perspectives of synchrony and diachrony in their research.
A corollary of this first view, espoused in this anthology either explicitly or implicitly, is that if only standard Mandarin grammar is analysed, then such connections between the diachronic and the synchronic state may often be overlooked. This could simply be due to Mandarin innovating where other dialect groups have remained more conservative in their retention of features of Archaic and Medieval Chinese. This possibility has been pointed out in seminal studies by Hashimoto on Hakka (1973, 1992) and shown to be the case for various features of grammar in Southern Min by Y.-C. Li (1986) on aspect and negation, Mei and Yang (1995) on chronological strata in Min, not to mention in the research of scholars such as Zhu Dexi (1990) and Anne Yue-Hashimoto (1991b, 1993a,b) on Southern Sinitic syntactic typology, particularly interrogative structures. The same phenomenon for morphosyntax has been described for Min passive and comitative markers in Chappell (forthcoming (a)), which resembles Late Medieval Chinese more closely than Mandarin where grammatical renovation has occurred. It will be seen that the studies in this volume effectively meld these two approaches of synchrony and diachrony.
It has been suggested by Paul F. M. Yang (1977-8) that the pre-syllables found in some disyllabic words in north and south Chinese dialects are remnants of Archaic Chinese prefixes. Yet nowhere, until recently, had Sinitic languages been found in which affixes such as those isolated by Yang still played a clear derivational role, with a discernible meaning. The recent efflorescence of descriptive work on Chinese dialects has changed this state of affairs.
The present study examines a syntactically aberrant construction in Sinitic languages which I provisionally label the double unaccusative. This construction represents a clear example of a syntactic construction where the rules of grammar, narrowly understood, are violated: in the double unaccusative, intransitive process verbs take two arguments, one more argument than the verb valency should allow, recalling the “one-too-many-argument” problem described in Shibatani (1994).
A semantic analysis of the polysemy of analytic passive constructions in standard Chinese (Mandarin) that belong to both formal and colloquial levels of language is undertaken here. The three passive constructions in question all have the basic syntactic form of NP(undergoer)-BEI/ RA NG/JIA O-NP (agent) - VP. The view of the formal bèi passive as an adversity passive in its continuing traditional usage in the spoken language is upheld and supported principally by the evidence of the semantic analysis. Its treatment as a polysemous structure results in division into two main types - the formal bèi passive and the bèi passive of ‘translatese ‘ in written language. For the second type, it will be shown that the influence of European languages in translation has led to the loss of the adversity feature, the requirement of an overt agent, and a perfective predicate. Finally, an argument in favor of considering the colloquial adversity passives formed by ràng and jiào to contain certain semantic features, distinct both from one another and from the bèi passive, is presented. It is contended that ràng forms passives of ‘avoidable’ events whereas jiào forms passives expressing the unexpected nature of the event. Both contrast to bèi, where the serious nature of the adversity is encoded. A newly arisen grammatical construction is expressed by means of adopting an appropriate lexical form.
The lexicalist vs. transformationalist controversy involving causative sentences has been argued to the extreme extent in either position, studies based on Fillmore's case grammar by Sasaki (1971) and Taylor (1971) representing the former, and those based on the theory of lexical decomposition by McCawley (1968) and G. Lakoff (1970) representing the latter. The following work presents arguments that neither of these extreme positions is correct in Japanese. Different types of evidence are presented for the position that derives the lexical causative, e.g., koros 'kill', lexically and the affixal causative, e.g., sin-ase 'cause to die', transformationally.
Defines the causative construction semantically and describes various syntactic constructions that answer the definition. Intentional and unintentional causative constructions are distinguished. The semantic content of all intentional causative constructions is analyzed. (Author/RM)
This paper explores the contribution of missionary linguists to the documentation, description, and maintenance of Aboriginal languages of the Kimberley region of Western Australia from the establishment of the first enduring mission in 1890 to 1960. It is argued that the primary contribution was to language documentation. However, the descriptive contribution was not negligible, and many missionary linguists struggled intelligently with the descriptive challenges confronting them (ergative case-marking, noun-class systems, compound verb constructions, etc.). Rather than being rigidly bound by the Latinate model, they modified it in various ways (usually not explicitly discussed), including by using traditional terminology in novel ways.
Despite the crucial dependence of synchronic meaning on both historical and cognitive context, we have traditionally used different tools for expressing synchronic and diachronic generalizations in modeling a complex semantic category like the diminutive. This is due in part to the extraordinary, often contradictory range of its senses synchronically (small size, affection, approximation, intensification, imitation, female gender), and the difficulty of proposing a coherent historical reconstruction for these senses. I propose to model the synchronic and diachronic semantics of the diminutive category with a RADIAL CATEGORY (George Lakoff 1987), a type of structured polysemy that explicitly models the different senses of the diminutive and the metaphorical and inferential relations which bind them. Synchronically, this model explains the varied and contradictory senses of the diminutive. Diachronically, the radial category acts as a kind of ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEANING, expressing the generalizations of the classic mechanisms of semantic change (metaphor, abstraction and inference) as well as a new one: LAMBDA-ABSTRACTION, which accounts for the rise of quantificational meaning and second-order predicates in the diminutive. The model also predicts that the origins of the diminutive cross-linguistically lie in words semantically or pragmatically linked to children. I test the model by considering the semantics of the diminutive in over 60 languages, examining the origins of the diminutive in many of these, particularly in Indo-European where the theory suggests a new reconstruction of the proto-semantics of the PIE suffix *-ko-.
This article presents the first study of crosslinguistic variation in grammaticalization processes affecting verba dicendi in Sinitic languages, making use of discourse data in the comparison. Its principal objective is to undertake a quantitative analysis of SAY verbs used as complementizers in Southern Min and Cantonese in order to pinpoint the stages reached in grammaticalization. In particular, it will be argued that Southern Min is more advanced in its development of a complementizer than is Cantonese. A second and more general objective is to provide an overview of grammaticalized functions of SAY verbs in an enlarged sample of 10 Sinitic languages for which discourse data is also available, including Hakka, Xiang,Wu, Jin, Gan and 3 varieties of Mandarin.
Manuscript from Biblioteca Universitaria Provincial Barcelona (Handwritten title: Gramatica China) Anonymous author(s)
- La Arte De
- Chiõ Lengua
- Chiu
Arte de la lengua Chiõ Chiu. 1620. Manuscript from Biblioteca Universitaria
Provincial Barcelona (Handwritten title: Gramatica China). Anonymous
author(s).
Derivation time of colloquial Min from Archaic Chinese. Bulletin of the Institute of History and
- Ting
- Pang-Hsin
Ting, Pang-Hsin. 1983. Derivation time of colloquial Min from Archaic Chinese.
Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 54.4.
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