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Article published In:
Language and Linguistics
Vol. 19:2 (2018) ► pp.209–230

Benefactive and malefactive constructions in Taiwan Southern Min

| National Chung Cheng University

This paper aims to investigate both Fagerli’s (2001) proposal that in serializing languages benefactive and malefactive constructions often involve the morpheme denoting ‘give’, and Radetzky & Smith’s (2010) proposal that East and South Asian languages often involve different morphemes or structures in expressing benefaction or malefaction. Checking the proposals against benefactive and malefactive constructions in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) which involve optional benefactee and malefactee, this paper shows that both proposals find only partial support from TSM data. TSM uses the morpheme denoting ‘give’, i.e. hoo, in the malefactive construction involving optional malefactee, but not the benefactive construction involving optional benefactee, which involves the use of ka. Moreover, ka can also be used for introducing the malefactive. Even though the hoo malefactive construction and the ka benefactive construction have different structures, the constructions involving ka, no matter whether denoting benefaction or malefaction, have the same syntactic structure.

Keywords: Taiwan Southern Min, benefactive construction, malefactive construction, ka construction, hoo construction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Semantics of benefactive/malefactive
      • 2.1.1Types of benefactive
      • 2.1.2Types of malefactive
    • 2.2Benefactive/malefactive morphemes/constructions
      • 2.2.1Languages of Europe
      • 2.2.2Languages of Asia
    • 2.3On hoo
    • 2.4On ka
  • 3.Benefactive constructions in Taiwan Southern Min
  • 4.Malefactive constructions in Taiwan Southern Min
  • 5.The proposal
    • 5.1Malefactive
      • 5.1.1Malefactive ka-construction
      • 5.1.2Malefactive hoo-construction
    • 5.2Benefactive ka-construction
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 15 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00008.lin
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