Families of Ditransitive Constructions in Li Jing Ji*
LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS 6.4:707-737, 2005 2005-0-006-004-000022-1 Families of Ditransitive Constructions in Li Jing Ji* Chinfa Lien National Tsing Hua University This is a construction-based account of families of ditransitive constructions in Li Jing Ji, the sixteenth century script of a play (dating back to AD 1566) writ- ten in a mixture of Quanzhou and Chaozhou dialects, two varieties of Southern Min spoken in southern Fujian (Wu 2001). I shall argue that polyfunctionality of some amphibious lexical items, be they inherent ditransitive verbs or otherwise, is amenable to a well motivated treatment in terms of the framework of construction grammar (Fillmore et al. 1988, Goldberg 1995, Jackendoff 1997, and Kay & Fillmore 1999). A ditransitive construction basically involves three semantic roles, viz., source, goal, and theme, in tandem with grammatical functions denoted by subject, direct object, and indirect object. I first examine the extended construc- tions featuring khit4 乞, thoo7 度, heng5/heng7 還, and yu3 與 as well as sang3 送, which are found to be closely related to ditransitive constructions. Then I explore two types of constructions bearing on the issue of whether the verbs in them are inherently or non-inherently ditransitive. The present paper proposes that the extended construction is a typologically unique feature in Southern Min, Mandarin included. It consists of a ditransitive construction and a pivotal construction. The bona fide ditransitive construction may be a result of conflating the extended construction. Key words: Li Jing Ji, ditransitive constructions, extended constructions, families, semantic roles, syntactic function, construction grammar, causatives, typology, Southern Min, sixteenth century 1.
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