Constructionalization without Grammaticalization: The Form-meaning Reassociation in the Novel Use of YONG in Taiwan Mandarin

• Main Authors: Xu, Rui-Liang, 徐睿良
• Other Authors: Liu, Mei-Chun
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/ty496d

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 === 101 === With an elaboration of its grammatical function and semantic properties, this thesis aims to explore the mechanisms by which the novel use of YONG came into being in Taiwan Mandarin. In recent years, the novel use of YONG as either an anaphoric pro-verb or a process-referring verb had got transferred from Taiwan Southern Min to Taiwan Mandarin and has been widely used in informal or colloquial registers. When being used as s a pro-verb, YONG substitutes a forementioned antecedent VP to avoid redundant repetition in discourse. When being used as a process-referring verb, YONG sketchily denotes a process fulfilled in certain manner rather than specifies the actual event undertaken as other ordinary verbs do. Though these two functions of YONG are syntactically different, they share plenty of semantic similarities. To deal with their lexical semantics, the multiple complementary approaches combining Construction Grammar, Frame Semantics and Qualia Structure are adopted. Thus, verbal semantics of these novel uses of YONG can be accounted for and presented effectively in a systematic way. The core issue of this thesis concerns the contact-induced language change involved in the emergence of the novel use of YONG. In terms of grammatical convergence, the interlingual identification of YONG with a new form-meaning pairing can be viewed as a process of relexification (Lefebvre, 2009), since it is essentially a kind of “relabelling” of an existing form with a new meaning of a lexical item from another language. From the perspective of diachronic construction grammar (Bergs and Diewald, 2008; Traugott, 2011), the emergence of the novel function of YONG in Taiwan Mandarin demonstrates a process of construcionalization without grammaticali¬zation, since it is the creation of a new construction by re-association of the existing form-meaning pairing, but without the internal grammaticalization in the target language, Taiwan Mandarin. In other words, the novel functions of YONG do not resulted from contact-induced grammaticalization, as defined in the literature (Heine and Kuteva, 2003), but presents a case of constructionalization due to language contact. Finally, by providing the case study on the emergence of the novel use of YONG in Taiwan Mandarin, this thesis reveals characteristics and the on-going novel change of Taiwan languages. Only by probing into the actual language use in the real daily life, linguistic studies will factually reflect natural language. Theoretically, this thesis attempts to link researches of verbal lexical semantics and grammatical change with an integrated theoretical framework, namely, the constructional approach. Consequently, a unified explanation to the interrelation between these two linguistic areas can be established.