Semantic shifts and areal typology in Asia
Résumé
SEMANTIC SHIFTS AND AREAL TYPOLOGY IN ASIA
Hilary Chappell
Chinese University of Hong Kong &
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
In this talk, I examine a set of shared patterns in both lexical polysemy and grammaticalization pathways found in the languages of East and Southeast Asia. It will be argued that :
(i)Semantic change underlies lexical and morphosyntactic change, including grammaticalization, rather than being viewed as an incidental or ephiphenomenal process.
(ii)The detection of recurring patterns in the Mainland East and Southeast Asian region provides a more reliable basis for establishing linguistic areas than lists of features.
The areal patterns created by copular, locative, existential and possessive verbs and their syncretism (Chappell & Lü 2022) are outlined as a prelude to the discussion of the shared polysemy of « mother » augmentatives, SAY verbs and psycho-collocations across Asian languages.
In sum, this approach considers polysemy sharing as a crucial technique in the identification of linguistic areas in the domain of areal typology (cf. Koptjevskaja-Tamm & Liljegren 2017). To this end, we contend that the rather unembellished component of semantic change, typical of syntactic typology and grammaticalization frameworks, needs to be elaborated.
References:
Chappell, Hilary & Shanshan Lü. 2022. A semantic typology of location, existence, possession and copular verbs: polysemy sharing in Mainland East and Southeast Asia. Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences. 60.1: 1-82. (2022) https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0219
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria & Henril Liljegren. 2017. Semantic patterns from an areal perpective. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics, 204–236. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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