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The grammaticalization of causative verbs in Chinese dialects
Author(s)
Date Issued
2022
ISSN
2164-2818
2164-2834
Citation
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 2022, Vol. 12(6), pp. 709-738.
Type
Peer Reviewed Journal Article
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.
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