TITLE:
The Grammaticalization of Causative Verbs in Chinese Dialects
AUTHORS:
Kin Wing Kevin Chan
KEYWORDS:
Ablative Preposition, Causative Verbs, Chinese Dialects, Comitative Preposition, Grammaticalization
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.12 No.6,
December
12,
2022
ABSTRACT: The current study investigates the syncretism of causative verbs in 257 Chinese dialects and the following arguments are made. (i) All major lexical items of causative verbs (han, huan, huang, jiao and eu) collected in our database follow the same implicational relationship, and all of them originate from two sources, “to call” and “to teach”. (ii) According to our reconstructed grammaticalization path, it is observed that causative verbs in Chinese dialects undergo polygrammaticalization. A causative verb can directly grammaticalize into a comitative preposition and/or an ablative preposition. (iii) Once a causative verb acquires the function of a comitative preposition, it can further grammaticalize into a coordinating conjunction and/or an allative preposition. (vi) Our reconstructed pathway is supported by the parallel development in non-Sinitic languages. The semantic motivation and syntactic condition for the aforementioned grammaticalization are also provided in this paper.