Event Structure and Diachronic Change in Chinese: A Morpho-syntactic Study

本项目主要研究中古汉语言语系统的形态句法及其历时性变化。我们将认为，许多句法变化可归因于词形标记在言语领域的损失。古汉语是否有词形变化以及在多大程度上有词形变化是一个有争议的问题；一个丰富的词缀系统（Sagart 1999）和缺乏形态变化（Zádrapa 2011）已经被假设。考虑到汉语在古末和中古汉语早期经历的重大句法变化，以及由于词缀的丧失而导致的声调的同步发展，似乎至少有一些句法变化是由以前形态的不透明和/或丧失引发的。由于词法的丧失而导致的句法变化是一个很好的跨语言过程（Roberts and Roussou, 2003, McFadden, 2015，对于印欧语言，Saxena, 1997，对于藏语），我们将证明这一过程也可以假设为汉语。在早期的工作中，我们提出，为古语重建的词形是在一个与副语态内部方面结构相连的分裂副语态中进行的，而不是像Unger（1983）和Jin（2006）所假设的那样标记完成或不完成方面，并且它的缺失是汉语从更综合的语言转变为更分析的语言的触发因素之一（Meisterernst 2016, 2019， Aldridge和Meisterernst 2018）。这个项目的目的是为我们之前的建议提供基于证据的句法论证，这些建议由包括历史音韵学和形态学研究在内的语料库数据支持；也就是说，该项目将有助于最近在中国历史形态学背景下对历时句法的跨语言研究（例如Roberts and Roussou 2003， Van Gelderen 2011）。我们将特别关注后缀*-s的功能，它是汉语历史词形音系语言学文献中争议最小、讨论最多的词缀。以往的研究多集中在汉语的历史词法上，对动词词汇语义的研究很少。我们的项目将在句法框架内测试现有的词形音系研究结果；在对动词内在面相结构进行跨语言分类的句法测试的基础上，系统地检验了语音学重构的有效性。这是中国历史语言学的一个完全创新的方法，它将历史语音学与最近对历时句法的跨语言研究结合起来。

The project focuses on the morpho-syntax of the Chinese verbal system and its substantial diachronic changes in Middle Chinese. We will argue that a number of syntactic changes can be attributed to the loss of morphological marking in the verbal domain. The question whether and to which extent Archaic Chinese had morphological alternations is a debated issue; both a rich system of affixation (Sagart 1999) and the lack of morphological alternations (Zádrapa 2011) have been assumed. Considering the substantial syntactic changes Chinese underwent at the end of the Late Archaic and in the Early Middle Chinese periods, together with the concurrent development of tones due to the loss of affixation, it seems likely that at least some of the syntactic changes were triggered by opacity and/or loss of former morphology. Syntactic change due to loss of morphology is a well attested process cross-linguistically (Roberts and Roussou, 2003, McFadden 2015 for Indo-European languages, Saxena 1997 for Tibetan), and we will demonstrate that this process can also be assumed for Chinese. In earlier work, we proposed that the verbal morphology reconstructed for Archaic Chinese was hosted in a split VP connected to the internal aspectual structure of VP, instead of marking perfective or imperfective aspect, as has been assumed e.g. in Unger (1983), and Jin (2006), and that its loss was one of the triggers for a change of Chinese from a more synthetic to a more analytic language (Meisterernst 2016, 2019, Aldridge and Meisterernst 2018). The purpose of this project is to provide evidence-based syntactic arguments for our earlier proposal supported by a corpus of data which includes previous research on historical phonology and morphology; i.e. the project will contribute to recent cross-linguistic research on diachronic syntax (e.g. Roberts and Roussou 2003, Van Gelderen 2011) within the context of Chinese Historical Morphology. We will particularly focus on the functions of the suffix *-s, as the least controversial and most discussed affix in the linguistic literature on the Chinese historical morpho-phonology. Previous research mostly concentrated on the Historical Morphology of Chinese, predominantly not going beyond the investigation of the lexical semantics of the verbs. Our project will test the results of the existing morpho-phonological research within a syntactic framework; the validity of the morpho-phonological reconstructions will be checked systematically on the basis of syntactic tests pre-defined for the classification of the intrinsic aspectual structure of verbs cross-linguistically. This is an entirely innovative approach for Chinese Historical Linguistics, which joins historical morpho-phonology with recent cross-linguistic research on diachronic syntax.