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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

Complementation in Waxiang: an unclassified Sinitic language of Hunan

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COMPLEMENTATION IN WAXIANG, AN UNCLASSIFIED SINITIC LANGUAGE OF HUNAN Hilary M. Chappell 曹茜蕾 Chinese University of Hong Kong & Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris This paper will explore the nature of complementation and the complement clause, and the inherent problems of defining this phenomenon, using fieldwork data from Waxiang, an unclassified Sinitic language of Xiangxi湘西 in western Hunan. Unlike German or French, complementizers in Sinitic languages are not required syntactically, as, for example, in Southern Min, Cantonese Yue and Taiwanese Mandarin, though be it their presence engenders a different attitudinal stance on the part of the speaker. My earlier work on quotatives and SAY-complementation in Southern Min (Chappell 2008) demonstrated that the complementizer kong2 講 (< ‘say’) does not belong to the complement clause acting as its head, but rather to the matrix in head-final position. This is clearly the case from both intonational and tone sandhi features. By contrast, in many other Sinitic languages, this pathway of grammaticalization is either absent or emergent. Such is the case in Waxiang, from which data will be used to highlight the difficulty in distinguishing between finite and non-finite clauses as a central issue in complementation. Two examples are given below : (i)Hearsay quotative + complement u25 tʰoŋ55ʨi33kaŋ25 Co.CL :O[Xiang33 Jing55Jing55 uo41kəɯ33ŋyε33iau33zε33.] 1SG hear say PN next CLF monthwant come ‘I heard (it said) (that) Xiang Jing Jing will come next month.’ 我聽見講向晶晶下個月要來。 (ii)See + complement ȵiaŋ13San55 Mao13mɤŋ33ʨi33 Co.CL:O[va25pa41ȵiəɯ25 smallPN see there.be CLF girl ŋo55tsɿta25i13ka55.] childtrip oneVCL ‘Little San Mao saw (that) there was a girl who’d tripped over.’ 小三毛望見有囗個女伢子跌一迦。 The analysis thus focuses on quotative and perception verb constructions in Waxiang and the finite—non-finite distinction, for which a combination of semantic, syntactic and discourse diagnostics may be applied to multi-verb clauses in order to determine their structure and discourse value (cf. Heine et al 2013). The crucial issue is to evaluate whether it is possible, or even relevant, in Sinitic languages, such as Waxiang, to identify the components posited in the traditional bipartite analysis of complementation into matrix and complement clauses (cf. Dixon 2010). REFERENCES Chappell, Hilary. 2008. Variation in the grammaticalization of complementizers from verba dicendi in Sinitic languages. Linguistic Typology 12.1: 45-98. Dixon, R. M. W. 2010. Complement clauses and complementation strategies. Chapter 18 in R. M. W. Dixon, Basic Linguistic Theory, volume 2: Grammatical topics, 370–421. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heine, Bernd, Gunther Kaltenböck, Tania Kuteva, and Haiping Long. 2013. An outline of discourse grammar. In Shannon Bischoff and Carmen Jeny (eds.), Reflections on Functionalism in Linguistics, 155–206. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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hal-04544177 , version 1 (12-04-2024)

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Hilary Chappell. Complementation in Waxiang: an unclassified Sinitic language of Hunan. International Workshop on Discourse and Complementation, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, Oct 2023, Guangzhou, China. ⟨hal-04544177⟩
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