Title

Depictive in Taiwanese Southern Min

Author

Chifa Lien

Genre

Article  

Pages

389-410

Download

Language

English

Key words

depictive, subject-hosted, object-hosted, adjunct, resultative, preverbal, Taiwanese Southern Min, English, temporal order, sequential order, iconicity

Abstract

       The constructions with the structure Nsub-V-Nobj-ADJ in English can be constructed as adjunct-predicate constructions as well as causatives, resultatives and argument small clauses. For adjunct-predicate constructions referred to as depictives the adjunct-predicate can be subject-hosted, as in Jones fried the potatoes naked, or object-hosted, as in Jones fried the potatoes raw (rapoport 1993ab & 1999). This paper aims at first providing the corresponding constructions to express depictive Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM for short). Depictive in TSM are deployed more transparently as shown in its different sentential patterns: subject hosted adjunct-predicates occur in Nsub-ADJ-V-Nobj, as in A¹ Ong^7-a² thiam²-thiam² tih⁴ chu² mi⁷ 阿旺仔悿悿煮麵 ‘Mike cooked the noodle tired’, or Nsub-vadjunct-V-nobj, as in A¹ Ong⁷-a² chiu² chui³ tih⁴ hang¹ be²-ling⁵ chu⁵ 阿旺仔酒醉烘馬鈴薯 ‘Mike baked sweet potatoes drunk’. Object-hosted adjunct-predicates occur in Nsub-Adj-V-Nobj, as in A¹-Bing⁵ tiaⁿ⁷ tiaⁿ⁷ chiah⁸ chhiⁿ¹ o⁵-a² 阿明仔定定生吃耗子 ‘Tom often eat the oyster raw’ or the sui generic construction Nsub-CONJ (than³ 趁)-Nobj-ADJ-V, as in A¹ Ong⁷-a than³ thng¹ sio¹ sio¹ lim¹‧loh⁸-khi³ 阿旺仔趁湯燒燒飲落去 ‘Mike drank the soup hot’. We can see that the adjunct in depictive occurs after the main verb in English, whereas it is realized preverbally, be it subject-hosted or object-oriented, in TSM.

      The adjunct in a resultative rather a depictive as shown above appears after the object both in English and TSM. Thus, resultatives in TSM also observes the post-verbal constraint in that subject-hosted adjectives emerge as Nsub-V-Nobj-ADJ,  as in A¹ Lan⁵-a lim¹ chiu² chui³ a 阿蘭仔飲酒醉矣 ‘Lisa became drunk by drinking’, and object-hosted adjectives can be manifested as Nsub-Nobj-V-ADJ, as in I¹ thoo⁵-kha¹- sau² chhing¹-khi³ a 伊塗髉掃清氣矣 ‘He swept the floor clean’.

      In sum, despite a difference in internal semantic relation there is no difference in syntactic structure between depictive and resultative in English. By contrast, TSM shows a parallelism between temporal order and word order, viz., the adjunct has to appear before the main verb in depictive and it occurs after the main verb in resultatives. The different semantic structure between the different sentence patterns is in a sense coded in surface word order.