A Typological Approach To Resultative In East Asian Languages

“Result” is a common functional category of human languages,but it could vary in the forms it takes on in different languages.Due to the fact that results are closely related to actions and processes,which are generally expressed by verbs,people use verbs to express causes or reasons so as to build a cause-and-result relation,in spite of some languages expressing states of being with adjectives,e.g.Chinese.According to cross-linguistic surveys,there are generally many types of morphosyntactic forms to express the action-and-result relation: verb+verbal morphology,verb+verb,verb+adjective,verb+noun,verb+adjunct,the mirror images of the above forms included.Besides,adjective+adjective constructions are also found in a minority of languages.The research puts all the above types of forms into the category of “resultatives”.Previous studies show that universal implications of resultatives correlate with language families.Hence,this reasearch studies resultatives of East-Asian languages from two dimensions: language family dimension,syntactic and semantic dimension.Language family dimension covers Sino-Tibetan languages(including Chinese,TibetoBurman,Hmong-Mien,and Tai-Kadai),Austro-Asiatic languages,and Altaic languages.Syntactic and semantic dimension covers syntactic representations,semantic interpretations,and the syntax-semantic interface of resultatives.From the intersections of the two dimensions,this reasearch searches for the regional features of the EastAsian resultatives and the causes for those features and implications.The following are the main findings:(Ⅰ)Morphosyntactic featuresAccording to our cognitive strategies of “cause-result”,there are two ways of coding it: “cause and result” and “result and cause”.Most languages from Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Asiatic families are the “cause and result” type,the resultative R going after the action V,and the word order “V-R” is the dominant order.Yet the coding order of “result and cause”(R-V)also exists in a minority of languages from the two families.However,in Altaic languages and the Japanese language,“V-R” and “R-V” are two equally important coding orders.Resultatives of East-Asian languages fall generally into three classes: lexical,morphological,and analytic.The more morphological changes a language has,the more often lexical and morphological resultatives are used,but the less fixed the relatedness between V and R become.Altaic resultatives are mostly lexical and morphological,and Tibetan and Chiang come next.Tibeto-Burman family,Jinghpo,and Burmese branches also have rich morphological changes.Old Chinese resembles Tibeto-Burman a lot,while modern Chinese shows a small number of lexical and morphological resultatives,featuring fixed VR resultatives.Vietnamese is much like Chinese,Hmong-Mien and Tai-Kadai family coming after,and Yiish branch has also developed fixed and productive VR resultatives.The development of East-Asian resultatives has a lot to do with the morphological and analytic features of the languages,among which word order is a key factor.The following hierarchies are based on the fixability and productivity of East-Asian VRresultatives:“Chinese >Vietnamese >Hmong-Mien,Tai-Kadai(Thai)>Lolo branch >Japanese > Tibetan >Chiang >Uygur,Korean”“Lolobranch >Burmese branch >Jinghpo >Tibetan >Chiang”(within TibetoBurman family).This hierarchy also exists within Lolo branch,in which Lahu resultatives are more fixed and productive than Yi,Lisu,and Naxi resultatives.It’s the activity verb that mainly enters the position of V in East-Asian resultatives,some of which also allow state verbs to get in but not achievement verbs or accomplishment verbs.A minority of languages,like Chinese,also allows qualitative adjectives to act as V.Meanwhile,it’s activity verbs,state predicates,and semantically delexical verbs that mainly can enter the position of R in East-Asian resultatives.The word order of V,R,O,and NEG in East-Asian languages generally conforms with the WALS statistics,according to which “SNegVO” is the dominant word order of SVO languages,and there are three word orders for VR:(i)“S-Neg-V-R-O”、(ii)“S-Neg-V-O-R”(iii)“S-V-O-Neg-R”。.In Tibeto-Burman,whose word order is SOV,when NEG collocate with resultatives,the word order is“S-O-Neg-V-R”.(Ⅱ)Semantic featuresIf a language has not got weak resultatives,it has not got strong resultatives,either.i.e.if a language has strong resultatives,it must have weak resultatives as well.(Washio 1999,2002)Weak resultatives are unmarked and strong resultatives are marked.(Li Chao 2007)Natural and conventional results of actions are also used fairly often,hence the stronger analogy the resultatives bear,the more languages they will be used in.Languages having fixed VR constructions have more productive indirect causatives and strong resultatives.Although strong resultatives do exist in other language families,Chinese has the most productive resultatives.Cross-linguistically,VR is extremely strong in analogy,and it provides the drive for more cause-and result relations in forming the VR resultative.In languages that have rich accomplishment verbs and achievement verbs,when these verbs combine with a result R,R will become more semantically constrained,and usually there is semantic implication between V and R.If a language allows the resultative whose R is semantically subject-oriented,it will also allow the objectoriented.If a language has resultatives with exceptional case-markings,it must have resultatives that are object-oriented.(Ⅲ)Event structure template of resultativesThere are four basic schemata for resultatives in East-Asian languages,such as [ACT]CAUSE[BECOME]、[ACT]CAUSE[ACT]、[BECOME]CAUSE[BECOME]、[BECOME]CAUSE[ACT].The most typical event structure of “cause and result” is [[x ACT<MAMMER>]CAUSE[BECOME[y<STATE>]]].However,the event structure of “result and cause” is [[BECOME [x<STATE>]]BY[x ACT<MANNER>y]].In some languages,state predicates cannot occur at the position of V,so some languages don’t have the structure of [[ BECOME [x<STATE1>]] CAUSE [BECOME[x<STATE2>]]].Serial verb constructions are widespread in the languages of the East Asia,so in many languages [ x ACT<MANNER>y] can occur at the position of R.In Chinese,When qualitative adjectives with low causativeness causes the action of high causativeness,[[x<STATE>]CAUSE[xACT<MANNER>y]] can be used.The emergence and development of resultatives in East Asian have both internal and external factors.Chinese resultatives have fixed forms,flexible combinations,and high productivity,and its strong vitality has driven the flourishing of resultatives in contiguous ethnic minority languages,among which there are not only languages that are of Chinese word order like Hmong-Mien and Tai-Kadai,but also languages that are of SOV word order such as Tibeto-Burman family.The syntactic structures of resultatives in many ethnic minority languages have become more fixed and stronger in analogy.In a word,language contact promotes the development of resultatives in East-Asian languages.The research provides further evidence of typological differences and similarities for cross-linguistic study of resultatives,helps to break the limitations of researching a single language and renews people’s understanding of resultatives.Moreover,it also helps to promote the application of resultatives in machine translation and Chinese teaching.