The grammaticalization of causative verbs in Chinese dialects

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.