Chapter published in:
Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography: A crosslinguistic perspective
Edited by Fuzhen Si and Luigi Rizzi
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 267] 2021
► pp. 244–259

Attitudinal applicative in action

| National Taiwan Normal University
| National Tsing Hua University
In this study, we have investigated a rather peculiar attitudinal construal of an applicative pronoun in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM), which may well advance our understanding of the split affectivity in Chinese dialects (cf. Tsai 2017), as exemplified below:
(1)
Guá
1sg
beh
want
lim
drink
hōo
hoo
i
3sg
kàu-khuì!
satisfied
“I want to drink to my satisfaction!”
It is also established that this type of pronominal usage is not specific to TSM but widely observed crosslinguistically (e.g., Vietnamese, Finnish, West Flemish, and Dominican Spanish; see Greco et al. 2017). Furthermore, the attitudinal applicative pronoun, though non-referential, has its root in an Affectee argument in association with the causative/passive marker of hōo. As it turns out, the expression hōo i has developed a speaker-oriented construal, expressing the intention to carry out the activity to the extreme.
Keywords: attitudinal applicatives, Taiwan Southern Min (TSM), applicative pronoun, causative/passive marker of hōo , affectee argument, speaker-oriented construal
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.267.11lau
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