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

• Applicant: Dr. Barbara Meisterernst
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 511963436

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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Taiwan
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Johann-Mattis List; Professor Dr. George Walkden
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Edith Catherine Aldridge, Ph.D.