Jawun Seminar 54: Clause-medial development and positional shifts of subjective adverbials by Prof Haiping Long
Speaker
Professor Haiping Long, School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University
Haiping Long, a professor at the School of Foreign Languages at Sun Yat-sen University, specializes in grammaticalization, linguistic typology, historical linguistics, and discourse grammar. He has co-authored several books, including World Lexicon of Grammaticalization, Second Edition (CUP), and has authored over 50 papers in journals including Studies in Language, Functions of Language, Linguistics, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Lingua, Language Sciences, Australian Journal of Lingusitics, and Language and Linguistics. He has led four national social science projects, including a prestigious major funding project (The Construction of the Lexicon for Discourse Markers in Historical Chinese and Relevant Theoretical Studies), and has been awarded the Lü Shuxiang Linguistics Second Prize as well as a provincial award for Philosophy and Social Sciences.
Abstract
From the perspective of interaction, one may specify three typical positions for the occurrence of subjective adverbials (SAs): the clause-initial position (CI-position), the clause-medial position (CM-position) between the subject and the main predicate, and the clause-final position (CF-position). Previous studies generally focus on SAs developed in the CI-position and have largely neglected SAs developed in the CM-position. The development of SAs in Chinese and other languages indicates that the CM-position is also typical for the development of SAs. SAs developed in the CI-position may later shift to occupy the CM- and CF-positions, and SAs developed in the CM-position may later shift to occupy the CI- and CF-positions. In both cases, the positional shift is abrupt, and filling the gap is the primary driving force for the change to take place. In this talk, I also re-examine the commonly accepted view that circumstance adverbials develop into SAs only in the CI-position.
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