Analytic Causatives

As with most fields of life, China can trace its history of word standardization back to ancient times, when the first dictionaries (such as Erya, ca. 3 rd century B.C.) appeared. Modern Standard Chinese used in Mainland China-Putonghua-has been subject to standardization since its proclamation as the official national language of China in 1956. The definition states quite clearly that its base is formed by the Northern dialects. This statement concerns also vocabulary. However, it is not a simple matter to make a choice of words which are to be used throughout the country. On the one hand, the so-called "Northern dialects" are spoken by almost 70% of the Han Chinese population, i.e. by about 800 million people. Although the Northern dialects are said to be quite uniform, the vast area that they cover must bring diversity in vocabulary. On the other hand, the remaining 30% of the Han Chinese speak a range of mutually unintelligible tongues, which are bound to penetrate the Northern dialects. The aim of this paper is to show how the lexicon of Putonghua is being codified. An attempt will be made to reveal how the basic vocabulary was selected during the forming of Putonghua in the 1950s. Some of the tools used by the State Language Commission in order to control the process of vocabulary standardization will be described. Moreover, the paper intends to describe the ongoing changes in the Chinese lexicon. It will show the sources of new words that are gradually accepted into the authoritative dictionaries of modern Chinese.

Chinese is commonly believed to be an analytic language, but evidence from philological works and cross-linguistic comparisons clearly suggests that various morphological operations existed in Old Chinese. The loss of Chinese morphology can be explained by the ideographic nature of Chinese characters: the Chinese language has been evolving in a way that stabilizes the pronunciation of each character. The effects of writing systems on language evolution can be widely observed from world languages, while writing per se has been evolving along the path of phonetization driven mainly by borrowings instead of conscious linguistic analysis. In history, language never picked writing systems based on linguistic features; instead, writing systems affect the evolutionary paths of languages: single signs of a writing system stabilize the basic units of the language.

This paper discusses result complements and phase complements in Chinese, both of which are postverbal elements. Despite their surface similarity, they are different with respect to argument realization. While the result complements allow complicated argument realization (in terms of semantic host, verbal transitivity, and subcategorization of objects), the phase complements function as lexical aspect markers, or Aktionsarten, and do not participate in argument realization. I adopt a constructional approach, particularly Boas's (2003) event-frames and linking rules. Inverted causative resultative constructions in Chinese are also discussed. They are strong evidence for "constructional participants" that interact with event participants in determining syntactic realizations.

This article proposes a new description of Cantonese causative–resultative constructions (CRCs), constructions with two verbal elements relevant to the cause and the effect of an event respectively. We present a constructional schema for the CRC with three argument types and without using traditional categories—such as subject, object and pseudo-passivation, present various syntactic and semantic properties, and subsume constructions such as the comparative construction and numerous particle constructions under this banner. We then argue against traditional approaches to CRCs with two lexical verbs that treat the argument structure of the CRC as composed from argument structures of individual verbs (the decompositional approach); instead, CRC arguments belong to the entire construction and have only semantic orientation-based relationships with individual verbs (the holistic approach). We show how our account can shed light on Sinitic typology and the grammaticalisation mechanism of...

Resultative verb compounds (RVCs) in Mandarin appear in a V1-V2 sequence and have three major subtypes-result-state, directional and completive RVCs with different degrees of compositionality depending on the extent to which the compound's meaning can be derived from the meanings of the component verbs. The derivation of the RVC has been analyzed as a lexical or syntactic process. Previous acquisition studies show that the RVC's compositionality and event structure are not fully acquired before the age of three. Findings conflict on whether the acquisition process revealed by early RVCs is usage-based or rule-based. We examined longitudinal data from two Mandarin-speaking children and administered a novel verb experiment on 32 children. The lexicalist approach to RVC formation is a better account for our data than the syntactic approach. Our data lend support to rule-based learning of RVCs. Children master the event structure of RVCs and its interaction with aspect gradually. The headedness of the RVC in relation to event structure depends Acknowledgments This article was based on my MPhil thesis written under the supervision of Thomas Hun-tak Lee as a member of the Language Acquisition Lab at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. See endnote 1 for more.

e paper investigates two constructions commonly thought to be semantically equivalent, S can V and S be able to V. Both modal can and semi-modal be able to are used to express ability that could be described as either mental or acquired accomplishment, pertaining to past or present. e difference between them is typically denoted as general ability or that someone managed to do something on a particular occasion. If not limited by the main verb (e.g. there is a constraint against can aer another modal verb), can and be able to are mostly interchangeable. Starting from the premise that every construction carries meaning which is dependent on the meaning of lexical elements occurring in that construction, the aim is to shed light on the usage of the two verb constructions and the degree of their interchangeability by examining their complements. To compare and contrast the two constructions, we rely on a corpus-based and quantitative method of collostructional analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004), or specifically on distinctive collexeme analysis which allows us to determine if the V slot in the construction is preferred by or restricted to particular lexemes. As S can V and S be able to V are highly attested in the corpus, the research is restricted only to their meaning of the present ability.

In this paper, we discuss the syntax of a causative construction in European Portuguese, which is similar to the ordinary causative (OC) but which also differs from it in important ways. We refer to this construction as the Locative Causative (LC) construction, which alternates between transitive (TLC) and intransitive (ILC) variants. We show that LCs entail a change of location of the theme and exhibit an existence presupposition on the theme. We suggest that this is because the entire VoiceP is embedded in a LocP structure, and that this structure also leads to the existence presupposition. We propose that both TLCs and ILCs may embed a passive VoiceP despite having infinitival morphology, and that the distinction between light verbs ‘go’ in ILCs and ‘put’ in TLCs stems from the presence or absence of an externalargument-introducing Voice head in the matrix clause. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn...

In this paper, we discuss the syntax of a causative construction in European Portuguese, which is similar to the ordinary causative (OC) but which also differs from it in important ways. We refer to this construction as the Locative Causative (LC) construction, which alternates between transitive (TLC) and intransitive (ILC) variants. We show that LCs entail a change of location of the theme and exhibit an existence presupposition on the theme. We suggest that this is because the entire VoiceP is embedded in a LocP structure, and that this structure also leads to the existence presupposition. We propose that both TLCs and ILCs may embed a passive VoiceP despite having infinitival morphology, and that the distinction between light verbs ‘go’ in ILCs and ‘put’ in TLCs stems from the presence or absence of an externalargument-introducing Voice head in the matrix clause. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn...

This paper contributes to the study of transitivity as a general property of the clause. Unlike most previous work on the subject, however, transitivity in the present article is used to study a lexical alternation, namely the two causative predicates dejar ‘let’ and hacer ‘make’ in Spanish. To do this, I use the transitivity index (TI), a weighted continuous measure of transitivity based on Hopper and Thompson’s (1980, transitivity in grammar and discourse, Language 56, 251–299) transitivity parameters. The advantage of the TI is that it assigns different weights to each of the transitivity parameters and it is therefore sensitive to the particular construction it is applied to. I show that the TI can correctly predict the two Spanish causatives dejar ‘let’ and hacer ‘make’ with 80% accuracy and demonstrate that hacer is associated with higher transitivity contexts. In addition, linguistic features of the causer such as grammatical person and number are found to help distinguish be...

This paper explores the conditions where Mandarin RVCs can be preserved in their Cantonese counterparts. Six types of Mandarin RVCsergatives, unergatives, accusatives, causatives, pseudo-passives and objectfrontinghave been examined. Modifications have been made for certain kinds of RVCs that are usually misclassified. The analysis has been done at both the lexical and syntactic levels. At the lexical level, the concept of 'strong resultative' and 'weak resultative' has been adduced to support the idea that indirect causation cannot be expressed by RVC in Cantonese. At the syntactic level, the presentations of the same RVCs falling into different sentence types are illustrated. Since the structure of Mandarin RVCs are often restricted in Cantonese, three substitutive constructions have been introduced for presenting the same resultatives in Cantonese.

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 Li Jīng Ji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.

The universal grammatical concept of causativity has received little attention from Igbo grammar scholars. On the contrary, the equally universal concept of transitivity is well studied but with attendant controversial issues. Nevertheless, the notions of causativity and transitivity are represented by the morpho-semantic properties of the Igbo verb. This study investigates these morphosyntactic properties in order to identify the contrasts between causativity and transitivity. The investigation involves an anlysis of the predicate and event structures of the Igbo verb. This leads to the conclusion that the contrast between transitivity and causativity in Igbo lies in the event structure of the verb. Verbs with transitivity features represent single events in their conceptualisation while causative verbs represent two sequential events in their conceptualisation.

In this paper we present an approach to lexical typology which will be referred to as the “frame method”. It was developed and tested in the Moscow Lexico-Typological Group and is currently used in all its projects, such as Majsak, Rakhilina (eds.) 2007, Britsyn et al. (eds.) 2009,
Kruglyakova 2010, Reznikova et al. 2012.
Our main principle, taken from the Moscow semantic school (Apresjan 1974/1992, cf. also Firth 1957: 11), is that lexical meanings can be studied and reconstructed by observing the word’s “surroundings”, primarily their collocation. Then, they can be compared by procedures
similar to those used in grammatical typology.
Section One will clarify the goals of lexical typology (LT), as we see them in relation to our method, and the method itself will be presented in more detail in Section Two.
Keywords: lexical typology, semantics, frame-based approach

The three concepts of case, valency and transitivity belong to the most discussed topics of modern linguistics. On the one hand, they are crucially connected with morphological aspects of the clause, including case marking, person agreement and voice. On the other hand, they are related to several semantic issues such as the meaning of case, semantico-syntactic verbal classes, and the semantic correlates of transitivity. The volume unifies papers written within different theoretical frameworks and representing variegated approaches (Optimality Theory, Government and Binding, various versions of the Functional approach, Cross-linguistic and Typological analyses), containing both numerous new findings in individual languages and valuable observations and generalizations related to case, valency and transitivity.

This paper contributes to the study of transitivity as a general property of the clause. I take seriously the claim that Transitivity is a scale made up of various contributing parameters and I propose the Transitivity Index (TI), a weighted continuous measure of clausal Transitivity inspired by Hopper and Thompson’s (1980) Transitivity parameters. The advantage of the TI is that it assigns different importance scores to each of the Transitivity parameters and it is therefore sensitive to the particular construction it is applied to. I show that the TI can correctly predict the two Spanish causatives dejar ‘let’ and hacer ‘make’ with 80% accuracy and I demonstrate that hacer is associated with higher transitivity contexts. The analysis is conducted on a dataset with over 4500 sentences taken from Corpus del Español (Davies 2002), which was analysed with Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression models. The TI adds hierarchical structure to the Transitivity parameters making it an i...

This paper contributes to the study of transitivity as a general property of the clause. Unlike most previous work on the subject, however, transitivity in the present article is used to study a lexical alternation, namely the two causative predicates dejar 'let' and hacer 'make' in Spanish. To do this, I use the transitivity index (TI), a weighted continuous measure of transitivity based on Hopper and Thompson's (1980, transitivity in grammar and discourse, Language 56, 251-299) transitivity parameters. The advantage of the TI is that it assigns different weights to each of the transitivity parameters and it is therefore sensitive to the particular construction it is applied to. I show that the TI can correctly predict the two Spanish causatives dejar 'let' and hacer 'make' with 80% accuracy and demonstrate that hacer is associated with higher transitivity contexts. In addition, linguistic features of the causer such as grammatical person and number are found to help distinguish between the two predicates. The finding that a lexical alternation can be reduced to a difference in transitivity raises important questions regarding the structure of the lexicon and the type of information it may contain.

From a historical perspective, this paper shows that resultatives in Modern Chinese are the result of the development of Chinese phonological structures. Initially, due to the devoicing effect of the causative prefix *s-, Old Chinese developed a voicing alternation in intransitive/transitive verbs. Later, the loss of this alternation triggered the appearance of 'V NP V' constructions. Owing to the change of its syllabic structures, Chinese witnessed a historic foot shift: namely, a shift from a bimoraic foot to a disyllabic foot. In order to meet the prosodic requirement, 'V NP V' constructions in Middle Chinese developed into two forms of resultatives over a long period of time: that is, V-DE constructions and V-V compounds. The reason why both V-DE constructions and V-V compounds can be found in Modern Chinese lies in information structuring. Chinese is an end-focus language, in which the end of a sentence carries the natural focus. The coexistence of V-DE constructions and V-V compounds satisfies the need to express different emphases.

In the past decades, corpus-based research has been gaining momentum in contemporary linguistics. While corpora, intended as large collections of naturally occurring texts, have always existed, rapid advances in computation and technology have provided tools for faster and more effective corpus construction and consultation. Chinese makes no exception: corpus data are now considered among the
main resource for many linguists, while large-scale surveys are beginning to be taken as an important tool for linguistic investigation.

This lemma introduces the basic structural characteristics of wh-questions in Old Chinese and the principle changes in Middle Chinese which led to the emergence of modern Chinese wh-questions. The lemma also briefly summarizes the emergence of the most common wh-words in use in modern Mandarin.

Mondorf, Britta and Ulrike Schneider. 2016. Detransitivization as a Support Strategy for Causative bring. English Language and Linguistics 20 (3). 439-462.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674316000290

This article presents diachronic corpus analyses of causative bring (bringcaus) which provide new insights into a fairly novel research paradigm in language change: the role of ‘Moderate Transitivity Contexts’ (MTCs) as a refuge for waning verbs and as a breeding ground for waxing verbs (see Mondorf 2010, 2011, 2016; Rohdenburg 2014b; Schneider & Mondorf 2015). It argues that the modulation of transitivity serves as a support strategy for a formerly well-established verb that is leaving the language.
The potential of semantic transitivity for the development of explanatory principles in language change has been hinted at by Hopper & Thompson (1980: 279). Empirically investigating the diachronic stages of detransitivisation for a recessive English verb we gain first systematic, empirically validated insights into the link between transitivity and language change.
This article adduces support for the claim that bringcaus + to-infinitive has (almost completely) lost its ability to take fully fledged direct objects. There are, however, at least three, partly overlapping contexts, in which this verb can stand its ground: with reflexives, modals and negation. What these contexts have in common is that they reduce the clause’s transitivity, defined by Hopper & Thompson (1980: 251) as ‘the effectiveness with which the verbal action takes place’. Assuming that the higher the transitivity, the stronger the effect of the verbal action is on the object, these detransitivised contexts can be interpreted as alleviating the effect of the verbal action.

This paper argues (i) that morphological passives with /Hi/ in Korean are derived from causatives, and (ii) that, although multiple suffixation with /Hi/ and /Hu/ is generally prohibited in the present-day Seoul Korean, its reminiscence is found at some point of time or place.

Causative constructions come in lexical and periphrastic variants, exemplified in English by Sam killed Lee and Sam caused Lee to die. While use of the former, the lexical causative, entails the truth of the latter, an entailment in the other direction does not hold.  The source of this asymmetry is commonly ascribed to the lexical causative having an additional prerequisite of “direct causation", such that the causative relation holds between a contiguous cause and effect (Fodor 1970, Katz 1970).  However, this explanation encounters both empirical and theoretical problems (Nelleman & van der Koot  2012). To explain the source of the directness inferences (as well as other longstanding puzzles), we propose a formal analysis based on the framework of Structural Equation Models (SEMs) (Pearl 2000) which provides the necessary background for licensing causal inferences. Specifically, we provide a formalization of a 'sufficient set of conditions' within a model and demonstrate its role in the selectional parameters of causative descriptions. We argue that “causal sufficiency” is not a property of singular conditions, but rather sets of conditions, which are individually necessary but only sufficient when taken together (a view originally motivated in the philosophical literature by Mackie 1965). We further introduce the notion of a “completion event” of a sufficient set, which is critical to explain the particular inferential profile of lexical causatives.

Drawing on the layered verb phrase hypothesis, the unexpected adversity imposed on the subject of causative-passives in Japanese will be explained by the loci of-sase and-rare, both of which may instantiate more than one functional heads. This hypothesis also gives an account of the marginal status of passive-causatives whose passivized subject (=causee) is animate. Turning to Korean, /Hi/ is univocally causative, and its apparent use as passive is the result of Voice-Cause bundling. Furthermore, the possible and impossible use of /Hi/ and /Hu/ as passive morphology results from their selectional properties.

This paper studies two Spanish constructions with the verb poner ('to put') and an infinitive. The first one, <ponerse a + infinitive>, has traditionally been considered an inchoative periphrasis; however, we will show that its grammaticalisation is only complete with inanimate or impersonal subjects, while with animate subjects the structure keeps causative semantics. The second one, <poner something / someone a + infinitive>, has received much less attention in the literature. Although it originated together with its se-counterpart, it has not become a periphrasis and today exhibits a hybrid behaviour similar to that of verbs of influence on the one hand and restructuring causative verbs on the other. It will be shown that both constructions started with a causative-aspectual meaning ('triggering an event') that they keep today: ponerse has a causative meaning despite being an auxiliary and poner has an aspectual meaning despite not being an auxiliary, which explains many of their special characteristics. This paper will not only shed light on the diachronic and synchronic properties of these constructions but will also reflect on the limits between lexical and grammatical categories. RESUMEN. Este trabajo estudia dos construcciones del español con el verbo poner y un infinitivo. La primera de ellas, <ponerse a + infinitivo>, se considera tradicionalmente una perífrasis verbal incoativa; sin embargo, demostraremos que su gramaticalización solo es completa en el caso de los sujetos inanimados e impersonales, mientras que con los sujetos animados la estructura retiene semántica causativa. La segunda, <poner algo / a alguien a + infinitivo>, ha recibido mucha menos atención en la bibliografía. Aunque se originó junto con su contrapartida reflxiva, no se ha convertido en una perífrasis y exhibe hoy un comportamiento híbrido que la acerca por un lado a los verbos de influencia y por otro a los causativos de reestructuración. Se demostrará que ambas construcciones comenzaron con un significado causativo-aspectual ('desencadenar el evento'), que mantienen hoy en día: ponerse tiene valor causativo, a persar de ser un auxiliar, y poner tiene valor aspectual a pesar de no ser un auxiliar, lo cual explica algunas de sus peculiaridades. Este artículo no solo pretende arrojar luz sobre las propiedades diacrónicas y sincrónicas de estas construcciones, sino también reflexionar sobre los límites entre las categorías léxicas y gramaticales.

The verb l ata 'let/make' in Icelandic provides a unique opportunity to understand the behavior of symmetric versus asymmetric DAT-NOM constructions, as well as the nature of nominative-accusative case alternations. In this paper, we take a close look at l ata and examine a set of cases where DAT-NOM verbs are embedded under l ata, resulting in the otherwise nominative object becoming accusative in some cases and remaining nominative in others. We propose that phase extension of an Appl head underlies both the availability of accusative in an embedded DAT-NOM verb and the possibility of A-moving a nominative object past the dative to the subject position. We further hypothesize that the base-generated position of the verbal root in the syntax underlies the lexical difference between symmetric and asymmetric DAT-NOM verbs.

The kinds of entities that can be described as causing an event depend, in part, on the language one speaks. Whereas in English and Chinese it is possible to say The knife cut the bread or The key opened the door, in Korean and many other languages, such sentences sound very odd. According to the initiator hypothesis, languages fall into two major groups with respect to possible external arguments in causal expressions: those that require that the causer be capable of generating its own energy and those that require only that the causer participate in the causal chain leading up to a particular result. In support of this hypothesis, we show that ability to self-energize has a larger impact on acceptability ratings in Korean than in either English or Chinese (Exp. 1). We also show that restrictions on possible causers extend to the semantics of possible causes in the descriptions of animations depicting causal chains (Exp. 2). Finally, we show that cross-linguistic differences in the linguistic coding of causers may have consequences for the way people conceptualize animations of causal chains in terms of number of events (Exp. 3). Implications for the representation of verb meaning and the semantics of external arguments in other languages are discussed.

The verb láta ‘let/make’ in Icelandic provides a unique opportunity to understand the behavior symmetric versus asymmetric DAT-NOM constructions, as well as the nature of nominative-accusative case alternations. In this paper, we take a close look at láta and examine a set of cases where DAT-NOM verbs are embedded under láta, resulting in the otherwise nominative object becoming accusative in some cases and remaining nominative in others. We propose that phase extension of an Appl head underlies both the availability of accusative in an embedded DAT-NOM verb and the possibility of A-moving a nominative object past the dative to the subject position. We further hypothesize that the base generated position of the verbal root in the syntax underlies the lexical difference between symmetric and asymmetric DAT-NOM verbs.

ABSTRACT. This paper studies the properties of a previously unnoticed passive construction found in some varieties of present day Spanish. Such construction, which we refer to as double passive (following NGRALE 2009), contains two adjacent passive complexes (Ese producto fue empezado a ser usado como conservante, Eng. That product was started to being used as a preservative), but only one of them is interpretable as a bona fide passive.

Across Tibeto-Burman (hereafter TB) languages we find causatives expressed both through morphological means (a prefix on the verb, a difference in the voicing and/or aspiration of the initial consonant, a change in tone, or a combination of these types of marking) and through syntactic means, using a verb meaning "to do" or "to cause" as an auxiliary in collocation to a main verb to create a causative construction. 1 A similar pattern is found across Sinitic languages as well, but while across Sinitic the morphological means are mere residues, across TB languages they are still productive, in various degrees. The causative auxiliaries used across the TB languages are related, but we do not seem to be able to trace them back to a single proto-TB pattern; as for the morphological means, according to LaPolla 2003, we can reconstruct at least three types of derivational morphology at the Sino-Tibetan (hereafter ST) level: *sprefix, voicing alternations and *-s suffix. These three types are at the origin of a large number of Old Chinese (hereafter OC) doublets of causative/simplex verbs, like 敗 bai (*prats) "to defeat" (V2) / bai (*N-prats>*brats) "to be defeated" (V1), 2 reconstructed from Middle Chinese (hereafter MC) collections of reading glosses (like the Jingdian Shiwen 經典釋文) and rhyme books.

Causative formation in the family of Afro-Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles (AECs) can be ordered along a continuum with an “African” and a “European” pole. On one end we find biclausal structures: A causative main verb takes a clausal complement marked for subjunctive mood. These structures appear to conform to a West African areal pattern in which subjunctive mood, instantiated in a modal complementizer, appears in a range of deontic contexts, including causatives. At the other end, causative formation involves English-style “raising”, hence reduced clauses. The prevalence of either pattern strongly correlates with the contact trajectory of an individual AEC. Languages that have been in continuous contact with English generally feature a more fragmented modal system in which causative formation follows idiosyncratic strategies. AECs that have been insulated from English for a longer period, and the African AECs in general, feature more unitary modal systems in which causative constructions are formally part of a larger functional domain of deonticity.

In this talk we will take into account the transitivization function of the root 打 dǎ ‘hit, beat, strike’ as a causative light verb, in Mandarin (打 dǎ), Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) (拍／打 phah4) and Hakka (打 da2):

1. a. TSM . 拍醒 phah4-chhin2 ‘phah4-wake up=wake’
b. Hailu Hakka 打衊 da2-met8 ‘da2-dirty=make dirty’
c. Mandarin 打死 dǎ-sǐ ‘dǎ-die’ either ‘beat and kill as a result’ or simply ‘kill (make die)’ (in the latter case, the resultant state ‘die’ can be reached performing different actions, as we will show)

We will deal with the diachronic development in the Chinese language of this root, showing that it appeared quite late with the meaning of ‘hit’ (cf. Schuessler 2007), and then underwent a gradual extension of meaning (cf. Zhu 2002). We will argue that the root 打 dǎ underwent a process of abstracting generalization: creation of a physical object→creation of abstract entities→bringing about of an event (cf. Moreno 1993). This process, according to Moreno, is cross-linguistically common among ‘make’ verbs. Accordingly, we propose that the use of the root 打 dǎ as a causative light verb derives from its ‘make’ meaning. As we will show, the variation among Sinitic languages shows different degrees of grammaticalization of this root; the data from Mandarin, TSM (cf. Lien 1999) and Hakka (cf. Yeh 2008) show that in Mandarin this root is less grammaticalized as a causative light verb than in TSM and Hakka.

Cited works

LIEN, C.F. (1999). A Typological Study of Causatives in Taiwan Southern Min. The Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, 29 (4):395-422.
MORENO, J.C. (1993). “Make” and the semantic origin of causativity: A typological study. In B. COMRIE & M. POLINSKY (eds.), Causatives and transitivity. Amsterdam:John Benjamins, 155-164.
SCHUESSLER, A. (2007). ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Honolulu:University of Hawaii Press.
YEH, C.S. (2008). A Family of da2 ‘hit’ Constructions in Hakka: An Inspection of Argument Realization and Transitivity. MA dissertation, National Chengchi University.
ZHU, J.J (2002). 近代汉语动词“打"的语义泛化 ‘The extension in meaning of Pre-Modern Mandarin “打 dǎ”’. Yantai daxue xuebao 15 (3):354-360.

This talk will deal with the issue of Chinese complex V-V verbs formed by means of a causative light V1 in Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) and Hakka. Mandarin Chinese has few lexical causatives (labile verbs), e.g. 开 kāi ‘open’ and 沉 chén ‘sink’; however, even when labile verbs are available, a compound form is generally preferred to express the transitive variant. The main means to express causativity in Mandarin Chinese are periphrastics means and complex verbs formed by two verbal roots (i.e. resultative compounds and verbs formed with a light V1). The tendency to express causativity by means of compounding seems to be linked to the analytic nature of Mandarin. This is even clearer if we consider the diachronic development of the Chinese language, which is characterized by a typological shift from a synthetic to an analytic language and by a substantial change in the lexicon. These factors apparently contributed also to the change in the ways to express causativity by means of different strategies.
In this talk we will focus only on complex V-V verbs formed with a phonetically realized light verb (带音的轻动词 dài yīn de qīng dòngcí), i.e. a verb that has general and abstract semantic content (see Grimshaw & Mester 1988, Feng 2005, Zhu 2005, Jie 2008), as e.g. Mandarin 打 dǎ ‘beat, strike, hit’, 弄 nòng ‘make’, 搞 gǎo ‘do’. These verbal roots, when appearing as V1s of V-V compounds often do not represent a particular action, origin or manner, as in the case of resultatives, but are blurred verbs, with a general causative meaning, forming the transitive version of intransitive change-of-state verbs, e.g. 弄沉 nòngchén ‘sink’, 弄暗 nòng’àn ‘darker’, 弄断 nòngduàn ‘break’; thus they are items involved inthe causative alternation.
Light verbs do not give any semantic contribution to the whole complex verb. The compound verb just expresses the resultant state, leaving the causing event unspecified: different actions can bring about the resultant state. Among light verbs, we will illustrate one particular case, i.e. the root 打 dǎ ‘hit, beat, strike’. In V-V compounds 打 dǎ can be used either as a full verb, forming a resultative compound, or as a light verb. In a complex verb like 打死 dǎsǐ ‘dǎ-die’, the meaning of 打 dǎ could be either ‘beat and kill (make die) as a result’ or simply ‘kill (make die)’; in the latter case, the resultant state ‘die’ can be reached performing different actions, as we will show. We will compare this root with TSM 拍 phah4 ‘hit’, e.g. a 拍醒 phah4 chhin2 ‘wake’, 拍破 phah4 phoa3 ‘break’ (Lien 1999:8) and Hakka 打 da2 ‘hit’, e.g. Hailu Hakka 打壞 da2 fai3 ‘break’, 打缺 da2 kiet4 ‘chip’ Yeh 2008:67-68). In TSM and Hakka this item seems to be more grammaticalized than in Mandarin. We will show the variation of use of this item among some other Sinitic languages (in some of them the change in meaning is signalled by tonal change) and the diachronic development of this item in the Chinese language. We will argue that its causative function derives from the progressive abstracting generalization of its ‘make’ meaning (cf. Moreno 1998).
Finally, we will illustrate another particular light verb, i.e. the Mandarin root 加 jiā ‘increase’, e.g. 加宽 jiākuān ‘increase + wide = widen’, 加深 jiāshēn ‘increase + deep = deepen’. We will propose that the root 加 jiā ‘increase’ 1) represents the causative component, forming the transitive variant of verbs of change of state based on open-range adjectives involving an increase in the property denoted by the adjective; 2) is the spell-out of one relevant part of the logical representation, i.e. the increasing event (cf. Hay, Kennedy & Levin 1999). Also, we will show that to form the transitive variant of change-of-state verbs based on open-range adjectives denoting a decrease in some properties (increase in negative properties), a V1 that marks the negative direction of the change in degree is required (cf. Steffen Chung 2006). Instances of this kind of formations can be found in TSM and Hakka too, e.g. TSM 加強 gāgiǒng ‘strengthen’, Meixian Hakka 加長ka44 tsoŋ 31.
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