As we have already stated, Old Chinese apparently made use of morphological means to form causatives. In this section, we will illustrate a few examples of such morphological devices.
According to most accounts, the prefix *s- in Old Chinese had causative, denominative, directive and intensive4 functions (cf. Mei 1989, Baxter & Sagart 1998,
Sagart 1999, Xu 2006, Schuessler 2007). In the examples (5)-(9), the causative function of the prefix *s- is highlighted5
:
(5) a. 吏 *(C-) rjɨ (ʔ)-s > liH > lì ‘clerk, minor officer’
b. 使 *s- (C-) rjɨ ʔ > shǐ > sriX ‘(cause to be an emissary:) send, cause’ From Baxter & Sagart (1998: 53)6
3 For other kinds of affixes in Old Chinese, cf. also Pulleyblank (2004).
4 It has been proposed that causativity and intensive/iterative are two aspects of one morpheme, but for practical purposes the two functions are taken apart in Chinese (cf. Schuessler 2007:19).
5 The examples seem to show that the suffix *s- could attach to different types of verbal roots. Note that, according to Pinker (1989), only languages with causative morphemes allow unergative verbs to undergo a productive lexical process of causativization.
6 In Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese reconstructions, the reconstruction is as follows: 吏 *[r]əәʔ-s → 使 *s-rəәʔ. The consonant (C-) is supposed to be r. The prefixed verb 使 *s-rəәʔ > shǐ later became a causative verb and was used in the periphrastic causatives (cf. 3.3.3).
(6) a. 食 * m-ləәk > zyik > shí ‘to eat’ b. 食 * s-m-ləәk-s > ziH > sì ‘to feed’
From Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese reconstructions 7:
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/wbaxter/old_chinese_reconstructions (7) a. 敗 *brads > bway > bài ‘ruined, become defeated’
b. 敗 *(s-brads >) *prads > pway > bài ‘ruined, become defeated’ Examples adapted from Mei (2009)
(8) a. 悟 (寤) *ŋâh > ŋaC > wù ‘to awake’
b. 蘇 *sŋa > sa > sū ‘to revive’ (From Schuessler 2007:52)
(9) a. 視 *gijʔ-s > dzyijH > shì ‘look, see’ b. 示 *s-gijʔ-s > zyijH > shì ‘show’
From Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese reconstructions:
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/wbaxter/old_chinese_reconstructions
Interestingly, the adding of an *s- prefix is apparently the oldest way of forming causative verbs in the Tibeto-Burman family (cf. Matisoff 2003) and, although this morph has disappeared, relics of its presence are visible in some Lahu verbs with causative meanings that differ only in tone and/or initial consonant from the corresponding non-causative verbs. Also, in Burmese the *s- prefix has given rise to aspiration of the following consonant (cf. Benedict 1972). Some scholars (cf. Chang 1971, Chang & Chang 1976 and Dai 2001) have shown that the *s- prefix has devoicing effects upon the following consonant, for example obstruents and sonorants (e.g. s-b > s-p > p), and that *s- prefix, due to this devoicing effect, has given rise to the voicing alternation in several Tibeto-Burman languages (cf. Mei 2009), as in the examples in (10), from Mei (2009), and in (11), from Shibatani & Pardeshi (2001:157):
(10) a. Lolo (also known as Yi in China: Burman-Lolo branch of Tibeto-Burman):
ge 33 ‘to break by itself’ / khe 33 ‘to cause to break’
b. Hayu (a Kiranti language in Nepal):
bek ‘to enter’ / phek ‘to bring, to take in’ (cf. Michailovsky 2003:523)
7 Verbs with the prefix *m- express controlled action by a volitional agent (cf. Sagart 1999:82). Some *m- and *s- verbs are formed only with some pair of verbs and this opposition is found in Tibetan: the *m- verbs express the action of the subject of a sentence (‘autonomous verbs’), in which the action is subject to be determined or changed by the will of the agent, or at least subjectively felt to be determined by him, while the *s- verbs express the action of the object of a sentence (‘causative verbs’); see Xu (2006). The distinction is also characterized as introvert verbs vs. causative/extrovert verbs (cf. Matisoff 1992, Schuessler 2007).
111 c. Tangut (a northeastern Tibeto-Burman language):
bja 2 ‘end, cut off (intr.) / phja 1 ‘cut off (tr.)’ (cf. Gong 2003:605)
(11) a. Cantonese:
kwo? ‘wide’ / kwok ‘widen (tr.)’
b. Burmese:
pyei’ ‘full’ / hpyei ‘fill’
c. Tiddim Chin (Kuki-Chin-Naga subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman family): pú?k ‘fall’
phú?k ‘fell’; kìa ‘fall’
According to Mei (2009), the voicing alternation in Chinese (cf. 3.4.1) is a reflex of the *s- prefix (cf. also Gong 2002).
Pulleyblank (1973) recognizes the causative function of the infix *-r-8; however, Sagart (1993) points out that it could be the case that it is the forcefulness of the action that characterizes the *-r- infixed forms. In (12) and (13) two examples of verbs infixed with *-r- are presented (from Baxter & Sagart 1998:62):
(12) a. 至 zhì < tsyijH < *tjit-s ‘arrive’ b. 致 zhì < trijH < *t-r-jit-s ‘bring’
(13) a. 出 chū < tsyhwit < *thjut ‘come out, go out, go away’ b. 黜 chù < trhwit < *th-r-jut ‘expel
Xu (2006:115) points out that the difference between 至 zhì and 致 zhì has been neutralized during the Western Han period (206-23 B.C.); the two characters were confused in transmitted documents. The morphological causative had fallen into disuse in Old Chinese and the lexical causative began to decline during the Han period; the causative use of 致 zhì disappeared and was confused with 至 zhì ‘arrive’, which in Mandarin Chinese has just the intransitive use.
One interesting alternation was noticed long time ago (cf. Karlgren 1933), namely the alternation between forms with or without *-j-, (cf. Baxter & Sagart 1998, Xu 2006), also known as “yod”, as in the examples in (14) and (15), from Xu (2006:116): (14) a. 入 *n-j-up > nyip > rù ‘to enter’ (*-j-)
b. 内 *nup > nop > nà ‘to send in’ (*-∅-) (15) a. 若 *n-j-ak > nyak > ruò ‘thus, like this’ (*-j-)
b. 諾 *nak > nak > nuò ‘to agree’ (*-∅-)
As for most the examples in this section, the forms in (b) are graphically derived by adding an element to the character in (a). However, differently from the other examples, where the derived (more complex) forms were the causative ones, the examples in (14) and (15) apparently show that in the case of the alternation *-∅- / *-j-, the unmarked form, i.e. the one without *-j-, is the causative one. Xu (2006) suggests that the examples in (14b) and (15b) can be retranslated as ‘to make enter’ and ‘to make similar'. Therefore, as far as the alternation *-∅- / *-j- is concerned, the causative form is the simplex one, i.e. the unmarked one, which seems to be quite strange if we were to consider the other kinds of affixation in Old Chinese, as well as the way in which causativity is generally expressed in other Tibeto-Burman languages, where the causative form is always the more “complex” one (cf. Xu 2006)9
.
Except for the case of the *-∅- / *-j- alternation, it seems that the morphological way to create causative forms in Old Chinese was a complex derived word formed by means of affixation. Adopting Ramchand’s (2008) framework, it seems that in Old Chinese an affix filled the init projection in the event structure (cf. 2.4.2), forming a derived causative verb. The presence of explicit causative affixes seems to support the causativizing analysis proposed in Ramchand (2008), as we have illustrated in the previous chapter (cf. 2.4.2). We do not aim at providing an analysis of the causativizing processes in Old Chinese but we just want to provide an overview of the evolution in the expression of causativity from Old to Modern Chinese, comparing the ways of forming causative verbs in different stages of the language. For this reason, we will give here just one example of the possible derivation of the causative formation in Old Chinese (cf. 16 representing 9b, repeated below):
(16) a. 視 *gijʔ-s > dzyijH > shì ‘look, see’ (cf. ex. 9) b. 示 *s-gijʔ-s > zyijH > shì ‘show’
9 For example, it has been noted (cf. Xu 2006) that a particular phenomenon of Lepcha (a language belonging to the Tibeto-Burman family), i.e. the disappearance of the old *s- prefix after palatalizing the root initial, can help understand the origins of *-j- in Old Chinese, see for example: nak ‘be straight’ vs. nyak ‘make straight’ (cf. Xu 2006:116).
113 initP
tu
DP1tu
s- procPtu
DP2tu
*gijʔ-s ‘look’ [init] XP
As already stated (cf. 3.2), affixes were lost in Middle Chinese and some of them gave rise to tones; Chinese became a tonal language and tonal alternation, together with the voiced/voiceless alternation, was the only synthetic means to indicate causativity, as we will see in 3.4.1.