| Crosslinguistically, it has been observed that certain lexical items such as 'give' verbs are especially amenable to grammaticalization. This study examines how a highly versatile morpheme bagi ('give') in Malay, a West Austronesian language, acquires a variety of grammatical functions. Based on contextual analyses of this morpheme in texts from literary periods that span about 400 years (late 16th to late 20th century), this study identifies among others the following major tracks of grammaticalization:; (+NP) (+NP) (+NP or nom VP) lexical 'give' > dative 'give' > benefactive 'give' > nominal(ized) purposive 'give' (+S) (+S, or VP) lexical 'give' > permissive/causative 'give' > clausal purposive 'give' (with inducive result or manner interpretations possible) .;While it has been claimed in the literature that purposive and manner 'give' constructions are extensions from the dative/benefactive track (e.g. Song 1997), the present study identifies an alternative path, namely the permissive/causative track. Moreover, this study provides evidence that in serializing languages such as Malay, purposive 'give' constructions can emerge from the same lexical source via separate paths to yield multiple forms, e.g. nominal(ized) (+NP or nomVP) and clausal (+S).;This study also identifies additional functions of bagi, such as reference marking, topic marking and stance marking, and further demonstrates with contextualized examples how these more abstract functions are related to other more basic functions such as dative and benefactive marking.;In addition, this study briefly reports some striking cross-dialectal and crosslinguistic parallels with respect to the grammaticalization of 'give' morphemes across languages. Among the areally and genetically diverse languages examined are Benue-Kwa languages (West Africa), Caribbean creole languages, Oceanic languages, and East and Southeast Asian languages. Comparisons of the 'give' constructions in these languages with the bagi constructions provide us with the outlines of an intricate set of implicational hierarchies pertaining to the grammaticalization of 'give' morphemes in general. The present study highlights the importance of pursuing similar detailed (and preferably diachronic) contextual analyses of 'give' constructions in other languages for a clearer formulation of how language-specific constraints interact with universal tendencies. |
