Profiling Hakka Bun 1 Causative Constructions

Abstract

This paper proposes that a family of four related constructions is needed to provide a more complete account for the syntactic and semantic generalizations and idiosyncrasies of the bun 1 causative constructions in Hakka by examining the features of CAUSER, CAUSEE, and EFFECT. The traditional claim of semantic entailment as a crucial feature of causation is argued to be too restrictive; pragmatic strengthening is argued to capture the dominant distribution of cause-act functions. In addition, in contrast to what is expected by the prototypical iconic sequencing of the participants in a causal chain, the sequence of a causing event and a resulting event from authentic data is shown to reveal a ground-figure asymmetry. The highlighting of the resulting event for information management is done by linguistic strategies such as topicalization or left-dislocation of CAUSEE and suppression of CAUSER. Such linguistic arrangements are speculated to prepare causative bun 1 for undergoing further grammaticalization into the passive function.

Polyfunctionality of ‘Give’ in Hui Varieties of Chinese: A Typological and Areal Perspective

“…Since the recipient phrase 'to somebody' naturally represents the goal of a giving act, which can then be further extended from a person ('to somebody') to an event ('for somebody to do something'), it is not surprising that the same GIVE morpheme for the recipient can also be employed to mark purpose by way of verb serialization, a highly productive strategy in West African languages and Mainland Southeast Asian languages, including Sinitic languages. Although our investigation and the existing literature only offer concrete examples of purpose marking in Tunxi Hui (9) and Wuyuan Hui, we can reasonably infer that this function is likely present in all Hui varieties based on comparative linguistic data from other Sinitic languages like Hakka (Lai 2001) and Cantonese (Chin 2011).…”

“…Such a difference in grammaticalization mechanisms also results in a divergence in the distribution of these two functions. The purpose marker function is fairly common in many Sinitic languages, by extending the goal of the action of giving from a recipient 'RPT' [+ human being] to an event 'PURP' (Lai 2001;Lu and Hui 2023). The pretranstive disposal marker function of 'give', however, is scarcely recorded in the literature, except for a few works, e.g., on Central Transitional Sinitic languages in Chappell's (2015) investigation as well as this study.…”

“…Regarding Sinitic languages, Tsao (1988), Lai (2001), Chin (2011), Ngai (2015), and Lu and Hui (2023), among others, have provided comprehensive insights into the polyfuncationality of the morpheme GIVE in varieties south of the Yangtze River, namely Taiwanese Southern Min, Hakka, Cantonese, Shaowu, and Tunxi Hui, respectively. These studies reveal that the morpheme GIVE serves six to nine concomitant functions in these Sinitic varieties, with all of them sharing the function of a passive marker, suggesting a pattern of areal distribution induced by language contact.…”

“…Another function pertinent to the recipient marker is the purpose function. It is sometimes termed a complementizer (Bisang 1996;Lai 2001). Due to the fact that Hui varieties generally lack overt morphological marking for syntactic relationships, we opt to use the term 'purpose marker' instead of 'complementizer' to emphasize its cognitive schema.…”

Supervised Word Sense Disambiguation on Polysemy with Neural Network Models: A Case Study of BUN in Taiwan Hakka

“…Extensive studies on word sense disambiguation (WSD) that engage in solving polysemous problems have provided valuable findings (Iacobacci et al, 2016;Kågebäck & Salomonsson, 2016;Raganato et al, 2017;Liu & Nguyen, 2018;Li et al, 2019). While most put emphasis on a few dominant languages like Drawing from findings of extant literature (Lai, 2001(Lai, , 2003a(Lai, , 2003b(Lai, , 2004(Lai, , 2015Chiang, 2006;Huang, 2012Huang, , 2014Huang, , 2015, the coding schemes of Pivotal (Chiang, 2006) Purposive (Huang, 2015) Causative (Lai, 2015) Causative…”