Extract
Common Chinese and early Chinese morphology.
1. INTRODUCTION
THIS PAPER CONSIDERS some modern dialect data that is relevant to the question of morphology in early Chinese. (1) Morphology consists of the principles governing word formation, especially the processes of inflection (regular changes a word undergoes) and derivation (affixation). The distinction between inflection and derivation originates with Marcus Terrentius Varro (116-27 8.C.E.), who called them "natural declension" and "voluntary declension" (Taylor 1995). That distinction may, however, be somewhat artificial in languages not of Greco-Roman origin. While these processes, especially inflection, are not usually considered present in Chinese on any large scale, a number of morphological functions have been posited for early Chinese and incorporated into reconstructions. Serious work was pioneered by French-trained sinologists, above all Henri Maspero (1883-1945). An early attempt, and the one perhaps best known to the greater linguistic world, is the ablaut case-system that Bernhard Karlgren proposed for early Chinese personal pronouns (1920), although that hypothesis was decisively demolished on philological grounds by George Kennedy (1956). Laurent Sagart's innovative Roots of Old Chinese (1999) is a recent effort to assemble evidence for the larger question of early morphology, and I shall examine here the two of Sagart's proposals that I consider the best supported. In another paper (Branner 1998) I have attempted to document the different backgrounds of the Western and native Chinese approaches to the evidence for early morphology. Premodern Chinese scholars, of course, historically treated nearly all grammatical issues within the restrictively lexicographic model inherited from the Han scholia. A number of early Manchu-period scholars took this model to an extreme degree, which I have termed "purist." The Western treatment of early Chinese, in contrast, seems from earlier times to have viewed the absence of an obvious derivational system as a kind of defect, to be remedied by the reconstruction of "lost" morphology. The "purist" and "reconstructionist" models are treated in detail in my 1998 paper, but I shall have a few words to say about them at the end of this one. The reconstruction of early Chinese has depended most heavily on coordinating medieval phonology with early rhyming and xiesheng [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] character structure. Although a certain number of reconstructed early Chinese features find support in the most conservative modern dialects, dialect evidence has been no more than a peripheral element in the study of early Chinese. In the case of early Chinese morphology, however, the usual sources can contribute very little, and scholars tend to turn for support to Tibeto-Burman languages and their reconstructed ancestor, proto-Tibeto-Burman. Reconstructed proto-Tibeto-Burman is not thought to be Chinese, however, nor any form of Chinese; it is a sister language to early Chinese, believed by its proponents to share a common ancestor with Chinese. For this reason, morphology in reconstructed Tibeto-Burman might be projected backwards into proto-Sino-Tibetan, but it makes relatively weak evidence for morphology in early Chinese itself. Even when comparable phonetic tokens can be identified in early Chinese, there is a methodological problem in interpreting them by way of Tibeto-Burman, moving as it were first backward to the putative ancestor and then forward into early Chinese. Much stronger would be native morphology in established forms of Chinese. It is with such internal Chinese evidence that this paper is concerned. For the purposes of discussion here I introduce the concept of "Common Chinese," meaning a notional metasystem comprising all modern varieties of Chinese (also Branner 2000: 160-66). True morphology, if it did once exist, is no longer productive in Common Chinese. That is, productive examples of morphology may easily be identified in many individual varieties of Chinese, but no such system has...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
