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Part of
Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography: A crosslinguistic perspective
Edited by Fuzhen Si and Luigi Rizzi
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 267] 2021
► pp. 261–286

Chapter 12
Multiple counterparts of Mandarin qu (go) in Teochew and their cartographic distributions

A new perspective into its multiple syntactic functions and grammaticalization process

| Georgetown University

Qu (lit. go, 去 ) in Mandarin is a thorny topic for syntactic analyses, considering that it has multiple functions but only one phonetic form, not to mention that Mandarin also has some other complicated syntactic constructions intertwined in the discussions. However, in Teochew, a variety of Southern Min, which boasts a richer phonetic and phonological system, its counterparts of Mandarin qu have different realizations, each corresponding to different syntactic functions. Through analyzing these different phonetic forms in Teochew and exploring their cartographic distributions, this paper aims to provide a new view from the perspective of Chinese dialect on the discussions on this topic. In addition to Zhang’s (2016: 188–197) descriptive observations on two Teochew counterparts of Mandarin qu – k’a and k’u, this paper also discusses another counterpart – k’ə, analyzes their syntactic characteristics and finds out that their cartographic distributions are located from the VP layer all the way up to the CP layer – namely VP, vP, AspectP, TP and SAttP in the CP domain, demonstrating a grammaticalization process. And k’u and k’ə are the outcome of morphological/phonological derivation from k’u. Some crosslinguistic comparisons between Teochew, Old Chinese, Mandarin Chinese and English are also made to make the picture clearer.

Keywords: qu , k’u , k’a , k’ə , Teochew, cartography, grammaticalization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical primaries: Cartography approach
  • 3.An in-depth analysis of k’u
    • 3.1 k’u as Verb head
    • 3.2 k’u as Comp of VP
    • 3.3 k’u as Aspect head
    • 3.4 k’u as Voice head
    • 3.5 k’u as v head
    • 3.6Interim conclusion
  • 4.An in-depth analysis of k’a
    • 4.1Progressive aspect
    • 4.2Speaker-oriented
    • 4.3Interim conclusion
  • 5.An in-depth analysis of k’ə
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.267.12luo
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