{"title":"Multiple functions of the Cantonese ‘wait’ verb dang2 and their historical development","authors":"Yik-Po Lai","doi":"10.1075/sl.19011.lai","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The diachronic development of morphemes meaning ‘wait’ has not been well documented. This paper describes multiple functions of the ‘wait’ verb dang2 in Hong Kong Cantonese: (a) a verb meaning ‘be in need of’, (b) a permissive verb meaning ‘let’, (c) a causative verb meaning ‘cause’, (d) a temporal marker meaning ‘at, when’, (e) a particle for giving notice of a coming event, and (f) a subordinating conjunction signifying someone’s surprise. Four development paths are proposed to account for the multifunctionality: ‘wait’ > (a); ‘wait’ > (d); ‘wait’ > (b) > (e); and ‘wait’ > (c) > (f). This case draws attention to the potential of ‘wait’ morphemes to be employed to express various other abstract concepts and, furthermore, highlights the role of indirect sources in the theory of grammaticalization.","PeriodicalId":46377,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Language","volume":"7 1","pages":"917-963"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2020-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Studies in Language","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.19011.lai","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract The diachronic development of morphemes meaning ‘wait’ has not been well documented. This paper describes multiple functions of the ‘wait’ verb dang2 in Hong Kong Cantonese: (a) a verb meaning ‘be in need of’, (b) a permissive verb meaning ‘let’, (c) a causative verb meaning ‘cause’, (d) a temporal marker meaning ‘at, when’, (e) a particle for giving notice of a coming event, and (f) a subordinating conjunction signifying someone’s surprise. Four development paths are proposed to account for the multifunctionality: ‘wait’ > (a); ‘wait’ > (d); ‘wait’ > (b) > (e); and ‘wait’ > (c) > (f). This case draws attention to the potential of ‘wait’ morphemes to be employed to express various other abstract concepts and, furthermore, highlights the role of indirect sources in the theory of grammaticalization.
期刊介绍：
Studies in Language provides a forum for the discussion of issues in contemporary linguistics from discourse-pragmatic, functional, and typological perspectives. Areas of central concern are: discourse grammar; syntactic, morphological and semantic universals; pragmatics; grammaticalization and grammaticalization theory; and the description of problems in individual languages from a discourse-pragmatic, functional, and typological perspective. Special emphasis is placed on works which contribute to the development of discourse-pragmatic, functional, and typological theory and which explore the application of empirical methodology to the analysis of grammar.
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