Also a related quip, probably poorly written, I made on this too, which I didn't make further replies about until now (my first reply to bradrn here).
Independently of these discussions from months ago, here I'm replying to a post from Circeus' recent thread, Eliminating verbal adjuncts. I didn't want to hog Circeus' thread for this, so I opened a separate one.
I think I'm failing to understanding something implied in your comment here. Isn't the fact these "minor verbs" (to use Aikhenvald's term) can't take aspect marking an argument in favour of them being prepositions? (I just want to understand the camp that thinks the opposite as I do... How does this favour them being verbs?)bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Sep 07, 2020 7:37 pmIn Cantonese at least, there’s a reasonable argument that these are actual verbs rather than prepositions: any word in the first position of an asymmetric serial verb clause is forbidden from taking an aspect suffix, no matter whether it’s a ‘verb’ or a ‘preposition’.
While we're at it, some definitions by Aikhenvald, if anyone that happens to be reading this thread finds them useful:
Aikhenvald, Serial Verbs, Oxford Bibliographies wrote:In terms of their composition, serial verbs divide into symmetrical and asymmetrical types.
Symmetrical serial verb constructions consist of two or more verbs chosen from semantically and grammatically unrestricted verb classes. Their semantics covers sequences of sub-actions or concomitant actions related to each other; the order of components tends to be iconic. Symmetrical serial verbs tend to become lexicalized.
Asymmetrical constructions include a “major” verb from an unrestricted class and a “minor” verb from a restricted verb class. They may express various grammatical categories, such as direction, orientation, aspect, change of state, adding an argument, and increasing valency. The order of components does not have to be iconic. The minor component tends to grammaticalize into an exponent of aspect or modality, directionality, etc. Then the erstwhile serial verb will lose its status as such.
It's a nice example, etymologically in particular, but I can't help to notice how some of those should probably be paired up as compounds... Some of them have well-established grammatical behaviour that should be mentioned too. I don't know whether Matthews bothers in that source, but that gloss strikes me as a bit more impressive than it needs to be, even if it's technically correct in some way. Specifically:bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Oct 03, 2020 3:54 amEDIT: I just found a particularly impressive SVC from Cantonese (Matthews 2006), with several adjuncts in one sentence:
keoi⁵ gon² faan¹ lai⁴ wan² jan² heoi³ bong¹ lei⁵ waan⁴ cin² bei² ngan⁴hong⁴
3s rush return come seek person go help you return money give bank
He came rushing back looking for someone to help you pay back the money to the bank
- 返嚟 faan1lai4 is pretty much a disyllabic term meaning 'to come back', even if literally being return-come, that is, go/come.back-come, sure. Here it serves as a directional complement of 趕 gon2 'to rush'. There are no morphemes that can be added between 返 faan1 and 嚟 lai4, although in other situations 返 faan1 and 嚟 lai4 have independent existences (when 返 faan1 alone means 'to come back, return to [a place]', or when 嚟 lai4 alone means 'to come', in either case the verbs being able to take aspect markers and direct objects on their own...)
- 搵人 wan2-jan2 is a verb-object compound meaning 'look for someone'. That this is one word is particularly noticeable in the tone of the latter morpheme: normally 人 'person' is jan4, but here it has become jan2 because Cantonese often does this switch to a tone #2 in disyllabic compounds of very high frequency, when the second syllable has a lower-register tone (such as tone #4 which is low-falling, [jɐn˨˩]), especially if it's a verb-object compound or a disyllabic noun-noun compound noun. A similar example is 搵錢 wan2-cin2 'to make money' (literally seek-money), in which 錢 'money', normally cin4, has been changed to cin2. Independently, say as a monosyllabic subject, or when modified by a relative clause and nothing else, 錢 cin4 'money' cannot become cin2.
- 去 heoi3 'go' has an established grammatical use, indicating the beginning of a purpose adjunct. You could think of it as a function word meaning 'in order to'. The meaning seems diachronically pretty transparent from 'go', but it's also established... Formal Mandarin allows 用以 yòngyǐ (literally use-take, with an archaic -yǐ "-take" morpheme) to express 'in order to', but spoken Cantonese hardly bothers (also spoken Mandarin). That it is fairly transparent doesn't stop these things from being fairly lexicalized...
- 還錢 waan4-cin2 'to pay back a loan' is another verb-object compound, also with the cin4 > cin2 morphophonological change of highest-frequency compounds.
The following gloss reduces the impressiveness of the gloss, but IMO reflects what is going on grammatically better (and is also more useful to learners, for what it's worth...):
佢趕返嚟搵人去幫你還錢畀銀行。
keui5 gon2-faan1lai4 wan2-jan2 heoi3 bong1 lei5 waan4-cin2 bei2 ngan4hong4
3SG rush-come.back seek-person in.order.to help 2SG pay.back-money to bank
'S/He rushed back looking for someone to help you pay back (the) money to the bank.'
At the same time, it seems clear to me there is a serial verb construction going on here... There isn't any morpheme that is unambiguously a non-verbal function word, and bong1 'help' all the way past the middle sentence is still referring back to keui5 'he/she' from the start of the sentence as its subject.
Regarding 去 heoi3 'to go; away; in order to', I suppose a somewhat similar discussion could be had about 'to' as a preposition meaning 'towards sth, for someone', and the 'to' of 'I help them to do a contribution', except that this English word is clearly a very unstressed, functional, grammatical word in both cases... But is 去 heoi3 here a content word or a function word, a verb or some kind of preposition? Does the difference matter in Cantonese?
As 2+3 Clusivity says here (in a thread I linked to above), intuitively at least it seems problematic to link several pretty different syntactic uses under one category... Like 上 shàng being 'go up, climb up; attend [an event, institution]' (as a transitive verb), 'on X, to the top of X' (as a (pseudo-?)postposition), 'up, upwards' (as a directional complement of verbs, perhaps an 'adverb' but often fairly reasonably called a verb...).