| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 語言學研究所 === 105 === This thesis aims to provide a preliminary study on the diachrony of five negators in Southern Min through a comparison of their grammatical functions between early and modern Southern Min: the pure negator 不 m7, the existential/possessive negator 無 bo5, the ability/possibility negator 袂 be7, the aspectual negator 未 bue7 and the imperative negator 勿 mai3. Early Southern Min data are drawn from playscripts from the Ming and Qing dynasty (mid 16th to late 19th century), missionary documents (early 17th century) and a pedagogical material of Southern Min published in Melaka (late 19th century). Modern Southern Min data are extracted from storybooks and TV dramas (late 20th to 21st century).
Negators in early Southern Min exhibit a clear division of labor. The negators 未 bue7 and 勿 mai3 as well as most grammatical functions of the other negators did not undergo changes, while some grammatical functions of the negators 不 m7, 無 bo5 and 袂 be7 underwent drastic changes. The irregularity and/or asymmetry found in negative contrsuctions in modern Southern Min is due not to structural factors but to language change.
The negator 無 bo5 is taking over the negators 不 m7 and 袂 be7 when functioning as a sentence-final particle in modern SM. Following Song (2015), the shift ‘不 > 無’ is argued to be a result of the pragmatic extension of 有 u7. However, the other shift ‘袂 > 無’ is not accounted for by such a proposal. Rather, the shift is attributed to reanalysis and analogy. When the former shift takes place, 無 bo5 is reanalyzed as a generic sentence-final particle. The new construction is constructionalized as a neutral-question construction (Noël 2007) and then analogized to 袂 be7.
The negator 無 bo5 can negate adjectives in modern Southern Min. This is argued to be a result of the Negative-existential Cycle (Croft 1991) in this study, which is presumably triggered by the pragmatic extension of 有 u7. As for another construction “袂 be7 + AP”, it is claimed to emerge from analogy, whose analogical ground is the construction “袂 be7 + VP”. Last but not least, this study supports the view that grammatical changes are possible to follow a lexical diffusion pattern (Yue-Hashimoto 1993b; Harris et al. 1995; Roberts 2007).
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