Precategoriality and syntax-based parts of speech

Abstract

Late Archaic Chinese is a precategorial language, i.e., a language whose lexical items are not preclassified in the lexicon for the syntactic functions of N and V. This will be shown on the basis of structural-conceptual criteria as those developed by Croft (2000) and Sasse (1993b) as well as on the basis of methodological criteria as those suggested by Evans & Osada (2005). As is claimed in Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2005), the meaning of lexical items is derived by integrating their own lexical meaning with the meaning contributed by the construction. The construction analysed in this paper is the argument structure construction. Linking between lexicon and syntax is subject to stereotypical pragmatic implicatures (Levinson 2000) that follow a version of the animacy hierarchy. As it will turn out, Late Archaic Chinese does not strictly lack parts of speech. In fact, without the distinction of nouns and verbs at the level of syntax it would not be possible to analyse utterances in Late Archaic Chinese. The only thing that Late Archaic Chinese can do without is noun/verb distinction in the lexicon. This typologically remarkable property is due to a process of morphological change. If such a historical process can take place irrespective of parts-of-speech distinctions, precategoriality in the lexicon cannot be a robust universal feature even if most theoretical approaches take it for granted.

On the nature of morphological alternations in Archaic Chinese and their relevance to morphosyntax

“…The general practice in Archaic Chinese syntax to transcribe transmitted texts in Mandarin pronunciation, followed even by eminent specialists of historical phonology (Pulleyblank 1995), masks a non-negligible amount of information relevant to syntactic analysis, and presents a highly misleading image of Chinese as a "pre-categorical" language (Bisang 2008, Sun 2020.…”

“…( Chen 1922) is one line of argument in favour of the notion of Archaic Chinese as a "pre-categorial" language (Bisang 2008, Zádrapa 2011, Sun 2020). However, we find in Archaic Chinese not only verbs turned into nouns, but also entire phrases.…”

“…I argue in this paper that, regardless of which system of Archaic Chinese reconstruction one adopts, the voicing and tonal alternations are incontrovertible evidence showing that this language was not purely isolating. Moreover, this morphology is not just a matter of word formation, but also has consequences for syntax, and is in particular incompatible with the notion of Archaic Chinese as a "pre categorical" language (Bisang 2008, Sun 2020).…”