Clitic pronouns in Archaic Chinese
Redouane Djamouri | CNRS-EHESS-INALCO, Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l’Asie orientale, France
Waltraud Paul | CNRS-EHESS-INALCO, Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l’Asie orientale, France
This article provides evidence for the so far neglected existence of two clitic pronouns, yǐ
以 and yǔ
與, in Archaic Chinese (10th c. – 3rd c. BC) in immediately
verb-adjacent position: ‘yǐ/yǔ-V’. While yǔ only encodes the comitative/associative, yǐ encodes all kinds of (argument and adjunct) roles, depending on the semantics of the verb involved. We argue that the clitic pronouns
yǐ and yǔ can neither be analysed as stranded prepositions left behind after extraction
of their complement (as, e.g., in English) nor as orphan prepositions, i.e., PPs with an in situ null
pronoun as complement (as, e.g., in French). This ties in with the general ban against prepositions lacking an overt complement, observed
throughout the history of Chinese.
Keywords: Archaic Chinese, syntax, ban on preposition stranding, orphan preposition, applicative, 以 yǐ
Published online: 16 April 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.19024.dja
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.19024.dja
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