The Causative s- and Nominalizing -s in Old Chinese and Related Matters in Proto-Sino-Tibetan

This paper shows that the causative *s- prefix and the nominalizing *-s suffix are both present in Proto-Sino-Tibetan. (1) In particular, it shows that Old Chinese voicing alternation in intransitive/transitive verbs, e.g. 敗 *brads ‘ruined, defeated’ /敗 *prads ‘to ruin, to defeat’, is due to the dev...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:語言暨語言學 2012-01, Vol.13 (1), p.001-028
Main Author: 梅祖麟(Mei, Tsu-lin)
Format: Article
Language:Chinese
Subjects:
A＆HCI
causative s- prefix
MEDLINE
nominalizing -s suffix
perfective -s suffix
Scopus
Sino-Tibetan morphology
SSCI
THCI
使動化 s- 前綴
原始漢藏語的形態
名物化 -s 後綴
既事式 -s 後綴
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Summary:This paper shows that the causative *s- prefix and the nominalizing *-s suffix are both present in Proto-Sino-Tibetan. (1) In particular, it shows that Old Chinese voicing alternation in intransitive/transitive verbs, e.g. 敗 *brads ‘ruined, defeated’ /敗 *prads ‘to ruin, to defeat’, is due to the devoicing effect of the causative *sprefix:*s-brads ＞ *prads. (2) The *-s suffix generally had a nominalizing function,where the derived noun is the patient of the action represented by the verb. In Modern Chinese this suffix is now reflected in the ‘departing’ tone, which confirms Haudricourt’s theory that the ‘departing’ tone came from the *-s suffix. For example OC *grjang 量平 ‘to measure’ : *grangs 量去 ‘a measure’ :: WT ‘grang-ba ‘to number, to count’ : grangs ‘a number’. (3) It is well known that the reflexes of the *-s suffix mark the perfective in many Tibeto-Burman languages, including Written Tibetan. In Old Chinese the pair 張平 *trjang ‘to stretch, extend’ / 脹去*trjangs ‘to be stretched, distended’ illustrates t
ISSN:1606-822X