Breaking Down the Barriers, 971-994 2013-1-050-045-000369-1 Cantonese sin 先 and the Question of Microvariation and Macrovariation Rint Sybesma (司馬翎) Leiden University This paper investigates the question of whether or not the atypical postverbal occurrence of the adverbial sin1 先 in Cantonese is due to language contact, as has been suggested. After teasing apart several different sins, which differ, to varying degrees, from one another in semantics, pronunciation and distribution, and after confirming that the postverbal sin1 is indeed an adverbial, we look at adverb placement in the Tai language Zhuang, observing that in this language (as is the case with other Tai languages) many more adverbials are found in postverbal position than is the case in Sinitic languages. We may therefore conclude that the positioning of sin1 behind the verb is indeed due to language contact. The question that comes up then, however, is why sin1 is the only postverbal adverbial in Cantonese. The speculative answer is that there were more, but that they have been reanalysed into verbal and sentence final particles, which may explain why Cantonese has many more such particles than Mandarin. Key words: Cantonese, Tai, adverb placement, sin/xian 1. Introduction To celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, the NewScientist issue of 24 January 2009 headlined: “Darwin was wrong”. The cover story (Lawton 2009) gives a detailed account of how it became necessary to uproot the tree of life. The tree of life, picturing how one species developed into another, was central to Darwin’s thinking; he used it as an organizing principle to explain the evolutionary relationships between different species. The discovery of DNA, however, has upset this orderly picture of the tree and its ever- smaller branches and twigs. “Darwin assumed that descent was exclusively ‘vertical’, with organisms passing traits down to their offspring. But what if species also routinely swapped genetic material with other species, or hybridised with them? Then the neat branching pattern would quickly degenerate into an impenetrable thicket of interrelated- ness, with species being closely related in some respects, but not others” (Lawton 2009: 36). And, as Lawton points out, this is exactly how the biological reality turns out to be: the interrelationships between species pattern like a web rather than like a branching tree. Rint Sybesma In linguistics, we have long grown used to the idea that family trees, as a means to organize the relationships between languages, are too beautiful to be true. We know that language contact can have serious consequences for the nature of a language, setting it apart typologically, lexically or otherwise from the other members of what is supposed to be one family. To be sure, languages can be affected by language contact to different degrees, with the “mixed languages” documented in Bakker & Mous (1994) being on one extreme end. More towards the other end of the spectrum, we have language families like Romance and Sinitic, the members of which are all definitely recognizable as being related in many respects (not just lexically), the differences being attributable to the different substrate languages which the different member languages are supposed to have (at least according to Norman 1988). An interesting question in this context relates to the difference that may or may not exist between macrocomparative and microcomparative differences. Defining these notions in relative terms, Kayne (2005:6) writes: “Work on a more closely related set of languages or dialects is more microcomparative than work on a less closely related set”, adding that “[a]s a first approximation, we can take degree of historical relatedness as an informal guideline for degree of syntactic ‘closeness’” (loc. cit.). He goes on to state that microcomparative syntax “is the closest we can come… to a controlled experiment in comparative syntax” (2005:8), explaining that such experiments, were they possible, would involve taking a particular language, let’s say, Italian, in which pronominal clitics follow infinitives, “and alter it minimally, for example, by giving it a ‘twist’ in such a way as to change the position of its clitics relative to infinitives. We would then carefully look at this new language… to see if any other syntactic properties have changed as an automatic result of our experimental twist… These experiments would dramatically increase our knowledge of what clusters of syntactic properties are linguistically signifi- cant” (2005:8). Since we cannot do such experiments, all we can do is examine sets of very closely related languages, “languages that differ from one another in only a rela- tively small number of syntactic ways” and hope to “achieve something of the same effect” (2005:8). With respect to the difference between microcomparison and macrocom- parison, Kayne’s idea is that when we study closely related languages, we get closer to a “controlled experiment” than when we study unrelated or less closely related languages. Kayne is right, of course, that we cannot do such experiments, but would it be possible that they could actually be observed to take place in language contact situations? As I mentioned above, languages change in contact situations, and some do so more radically than others. In cases in which there is little syntactic change, we may try to find out whether or not the changes that exist are interconnected. In this paper, I will investigate one point in which Cantonese (Yuè) is often reported to differ from Mandarin, namely the postverbal occurrence of adverbials, and see whether 972 Cantonese sin 先 and the Question of Microvariation and Macrovariation this difference can be taken as a Kaynian “twist”, since it seems to have arisen as a result of contact with Tai languages; Tai is supposed to be a substrate language of Cantonese (see references mentioned below). Our point of departure is the distribution of the element sin in Cantonese. 2. Sin: the facts Only considering the form, we seem to need to distinguish two different “sin” elements: one with a high level tone, [55] in the tradition set by Y. R. Chao, which we will represent as “sin1”, and one with a high falling tone, [53] (or lower than three), which we will represent as “sìn”. Taking the meaning and other factors into consideration as well (while at the same time excluding adjectival sin1 as well as sin1 in fixed expressions from the discussion right away), we seem to have to distinguish minimally four different sins: one sin1, meaning ‘first’, and three sìns: sìn1, occurring preverbally, meaning ‘only’ (among other things); sìn2, occurring postverbally, meaning something like ‘and then we’ll see’; and sìn3, a sentence final particle (henceforth, “SFP”) which is found in interrogative sentences to add emphasis (Tang 2006).1 1 For this overview, we have consulted the following works: Cheung (1972), Gao (1980), Lucas & Xie (1994), Mai (1993), Matthews & Yip (1994), Yuan (1983) and Zeng (1991). Although Cheung (1972) and Matthews & Yip (1994:355) observe that, tone-wise, there are two different “sin1s”, the distributional characterization they give is different from ours. Gao (1980) marks the tones in a way that is consistent with our marking method, but does not make any explicit comments about it. Lucas & Xie (1994) and Mai (1993) provide good and quite comprehensive descriptions, but are silent about tonal differences: the former has “sin1” consistently, the latter, written entirely in characters, indicates the pronunciation once in the beginning of the article, marking the tone as [53] (p.64). Despite this, Lucas & Xie (1994) also distinguish four different sins, which are more or less the same as the ones we distinguish in this paper. All data have been checked with native speakers. I would like to thank Lisa Cheng, Tak Cheung, Joanna Sio and Leo Wong for their help in this regard. The source of the examples is indicated by a capital letter (or two) and a number. The number is a page number, the letters refer to some of the works just mentioned, as follows: “G” stands for Gao (1980), “LX” for Lucas & Xie (1994), “M” for Mai (1993), “MY” for Matthews & Yip (1994), and “Y” for Yuan (1983). The glosses and the translations may not be same as in the original (if they had them). The same applies to the characters used to write the sentences here. All Cantonese examples are presented in Jyutping, the romanization system designed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, even if the original source used a different system. In case the original did not mark tones, they have been added. Key to the abbreviations used in the glosses: CLassifier; DEMonstrative; EXPeriential; Sentence Final Particle; SUCCessive; PERFective; PROGRessive; 1/2/3 SG/PL: first/second/third person singular/plural. 973 Rint Sybesma 2.1 Sin1 ‘first’ This paper will mainly be concerned with sin1, with a high level tone, an adverbial meaning ‘first of all, before anything else’. Here are some examples, with sin1 occurring in preverbal position as well as in postverbal position. 2,3 Note that, in postverbal position, when the verb is followed by a complement such as an object, sin1 follows that complement. (1) a. 啲女仔先唱歌。(LX196, adapted) di1 leoi5-zai2 sin1 coeng3-go1 CLPL girls first sing-song ‘The girls sing first.’ b. 我哋先睇下點再諗辦法。(MY192) ngo5-dei6 sin1 tai2 ha6 dim2 zoi3 lam2 baan6-faat3 1PL first look a.bit how again think solution ‘We’ll see how it goes first, and then think of the solution.’ (2) a. 唔該你斟杯茶俾我先。(Y228) m4-goi1 nei5 zam1 bui1 ca4 bei2 ngo5 sin1 please 2SG pour cup tea give 1SG first ‘Please pour me a cup of tea first.’ b. 喺 McDonald’s 食嘢要俾錢先。(LX198) hai2 McDonald’s sik6-je5 jiu3 bei2 cin2 sin1 at McDonald’s eat-things will give money first ‘When you eat at McDonald’s you have to pay first (in advance).’ c.