9.1 Introduction

Synchronically and diachronically, a great deal of research has been conducted on the semantics and syntax of the disposal construction in both traditional Chinese linguistics and general linguistics internationally. There are two main reasons why this construction has been the focus of Chinese linguistics: first, its syntactic configuration makes it appear to be an SOV word order, in sharp contrast to the basic SVO word order of the Chinese language, and second, Chinese seems to be the only case across languages where a superficial typological change from SVO to SOV might have occurred, motivated by internal evolution rather than language contact. Thus numerous proposals have been made about the syntactic functions of the disposal construction and diachronic motivations for its development. Unfortunately, in our view, none of them are successful in characterizing its grammatical properties or identifying its diachronic development. In this chapter, we demonstrate that because of the fusion of the verb and the resultative via reanalysis, the syntactic position for a patient noun between them was eliminated so that the originally intervening patient noun needed to be rearranged somewhere in the sentence on the basis of the following principle: the patient noun was introduced in preverbal position by the disposal marker if it was definite, and was introduced by the first verb of the verb-copying construction if it was indefinite (for details, see Section 10.1). This issue is related to the motivations for the emergence of the verb-copying construction and the unmarked SOV structure, all of which were entirely innovative in Modern Chinese.

In the literature, there are two labels for the construction in question: “the disposal construction” and “the bǎ construction,” which have been used interchangeably. However, we prefer the former over the latter because there were at least five grammatical morphemes marking the construction in history: jiāng (from the verb take), bǎ (from the verb hold), ná (from the verb take at a later stage), guǎn (from the verb govern), and gěi (from the verb give), and the last four are still used in Standard Contemporary Chinese, let alone that there are dozens of different disposal morphemes in other Chinese dialects. We follow the convention of using the term “disposal construction,” although it is somewhat misleading in capturing the common semantics of the construction; for example, no “disposal” sense can be felt in the following examples:

The disposal construction appears to be quite special or unusual in Chinese grammar, both synchronically and diachronically, with the syntactic schema “Subj + PREP + Obj + VP” that seemingly resembles SOV word order. Two questions naturally arise: first, why did Chinese, as a typical SVO language throughout history, acquire such a special construction? Second, what is the function of this disposal construction? In the literature on Chinese linguistics, numerous hypotheses have been proposed in attempts to explain where it came from and what its function is, and some of them are briefly reviewed in the subsequent section. Moreover, these issues have aroused much interest among researchers in linguistic typology. On the basis of the development of the disposal construction, Reference Li, Thompson, Anderson and JonesLi and Thompson (1974) claimed that Chinese had shifted its basic word order from SVO to SOV, a counterexample to the historical generalization across languages that without external factors (i.e. language contact), an SOV language can evolve into an SVO language, but the reverse process is impossible (Reference LehmanLehmann 1973, Reference GivónGivón 1979, Reference LightLight 1979, Reference SmithSmith 1981, Reference Sun and TalmySun and Givón 1985). Reference Moravcsik and SongMoravcsik (2010) stated this concept as follows:

9.2 Hypotheses about Its Origins

Researchers, even those who are working in the same theoretical framework, usually hold quite different philosophies about the nature of language, which to a great extent influence their achievements, particularly in making assumptions when approaching certain issues and putting forward hypotheses to explain certain phenomena. Thus, in historical linguistics, there is hardly any consensus on any given issue regarding what could happen and what could not happen. We regard this as an ideal chance to frankly state our own philosophical view on language by critically reviewing other researchers’ explanations for the same phenomenon. In what follows, we will review several influential hypotheses about the motivation for the emergence of the disposal construction.

9.3 Functions of the Disposal Construction

An accurate characterization of the functions of the disposal construction is undoubtedly helpful in studies on its diachronic development. Identifying the unique grammatical properties of the disposal construction can provide us with a clue to why and where it was first introduced into the language. In this section, we briefly review representative views on the semantics and syntax of the disposal construction and then put forward our analysis, which will be applied to the diachronic investigation in the following sections (cf. Section 7.6.1). The syntactic schema of the disposal construction can be described as follows, with bǎ representing all the disposal markers:

1. (16)

   The syntactic schema of the disposal constructionFootnote 2

   Subj + (bǎ + NP) + VP.

The subject is optional, but the remaining three elements are essential to make a disposal sentence well formed. In the construction, the patient NP stands out through being marked by bǎ, where the VP constitutes the background. In our view, the semantic feature of the patient noun and, especially, the grammatical relation between the object of bǎ and the structure of the predicate are critical in identifying the status of the disposal construction in the grammatical system of Chinese.

First, some terminological issues need to be clarified. In the literature, the disposal markers are labeled by various terms, including “preposition,” “coverb,” “light verb,” and even “verb” (Reference Chao and ShuxiangChao 1979: 330‒338, Reference Li and ThompsonLi and Thompson 1981: 356‒369, Reference Huang, Audrey Li and LiHuang et al. 2009: 153‒196, Reference ShiShi 2010: 98‒108). These different labels do not necessarily reflect different views on the grammatical properties of the disposal morphemes but may simply indicate the habitual usages of individual researchers or conventions of different theoretical frameworks. However, there are indeed differences in degrees of grammaticalization from a content verb to a preposition in regard to the disposal markings. Roughly, all the major disposal markers that were used before the tenth century AD, including jiāng, bǎ, qǔ, chí, and zhuō, were actually content verbs, and some of them, such as jiāng and bǎ, had probably started to be grammaticalized at the time. However, the others remained ordinary verbs and were only occasionally used in contexts that were semantically similar to a disposal instance. Around the tenth century AD, the disposal markers jiāng and bǎ became fully grammaticalized and were already pure prepositions; meanwhile, both of them lost the major properties of verbs. For instance, they could not be used as the matrix verb, they could not be reduplicated, and they could not be suffixed with aspect markers. The verb ná “take” developed out of a disposal marker only in the eighteenth century AD, and it is still being used mainly as a regular verb in Contemporary Chinese. Similarly, the verb guǎn “control” developed use as a disposal marker only in the past century, and still behaves like an ordinary verb in most other situations.

As Reference WangWang (1943: 82) put it, if the disposal construction was just a simple inversion between the verb and the object, with the same function as an SVO structure or other structures, there should be no need for it to be innovated and to develop as a major apparatus in the grammar. Like all other constructions, the disposal construction exhibits a wide range of semantic and syntactic properties, from marginal to essential. To discover the motivation for its emergence in history, we must accurately capture the essential characteristics of the disposal construction that successfully distinguish it from other constructions. As mentioned previously, the term “disposal” is somewhat misleading because many instances under this label do not express any “disposal” meaning, and, more crucially, this “disposal” meaning can also be expressed by means of many other declarative SVO sentences. In other words, the term “disposal” cannot successfully distinguish the construction from other constructions. Similarly, there are many other analyses on the functions of the disposal construction. For instance, it increases the transitivity of the clause (Reference Chao and ShuxiangChao 1979: 330‒338, Reference Li and ThompsonLi and Thompson 1981: 463‒491, Reference SunSun 1996: 52‒81), highlights the affectedness of the object (Reference HuangHuang 2006), or indicates a bounded event. However, all these proposals also fail to characterize the semantic and syntactic properties of the disposal construction because all the functions mentioned here can be expressed by an ordinary VO construction, as illustrated below:

In (17), the object nàgè bēizi “the glass” is definite and referential, and the predicate is a VR phrase, dǎ-suì “beat-broken,” expressing the maximal degree of transitivity and affectedness. Additionally, the whole event is temporally bounded. More importantly, the degrees of transitivity and affectedness are not necessary conditions for using the disposal construction; for example, in (18), the object of bǎ is Beijing city, and the main verb zǒu “walk” is intransitive. Thus it is difficult to say that the sentence expresses any meaning of a maximal degree of transitivity and affectedness. Regarding boundedness, an overwhelming majority of sentences, regardless of whether they are active or passive, are generally bounded by adding aspect markers, resultatives, quantifiers, and so forth (for details, see Chapter 15). Specifically, the predicate of the passive structure must also be bounded, exactly like the disposal construction. Clearly, the feature of boundedness also fails to distinguish the disposal constructions from others.

Moreover, disposal markers are labeled with various names, such as “preverbal transitive morpheme” or “preobject marker” (Reference Chao and ShuxiangChao 1979: 342). These labels are merely a superficial observation rather than a serious analysis. Chinese, as an SVO language, exploits word order to signal important grammatical relations; for instance, the subject precedes the verb, and the object follows the verb. Why does the speaker bother to move an object to preverbal position and to mark it with an extra linguistic form (e.g. bǎ)? In fact, many patient nouns in preverbal position do not need any marker. As Reference ZhuZhu (1982: 188‒189) pointed out, if the subject is absent, all the disposal markers can be removed from the sentences, turning them into “unmarked” passive sentences, as illustrated below:

1. (19)

   (a)

   把衣服都洗乾淨了。			(現代漢語)
   Bǎ	yīfú	dōu	xǐ-gānjìng	le.
   DISP	clothes	all	wash-clean	PERF

   “(He) has washed all clothes clean.”

   (b)

   衣服都洗乾淨了。			(現代漢語)
   Yīfú	dōu	xǐ-gānjìng	le.
   clothes	all	wash-clean	PERF
   “All clothes have been washed clean.”

   (Contemporary Chinese)

9.4 Two Historical Motivations

The evolution of grammar constitutes a chain of changes, where one change causes another one, and the latter change may serve as a trigger for further development. Few grammatical changes happened in the history of Chinese in isolation or independently, and none resulted purely from pragmatic inferences. Since a language’s grammar at any period represents an integrated system, every new device added to the system must be licensed by the overall properties of the grammatical system of the time. For the disposal construction, a legitimate question needs to be answered: why did this construction come into existence in Late Medieval Chinese rather than earlier or later? Why did it develop from occasional to robust usage and become a major and frequently used device? The answers reside in two motivations. First, a principle was formed at the time that automatically assigned the feature definite to a noun in preverbal position. Second, the verb and the resultative became fused into an immediate constituent by erasing the original syntactic position between them. As a result, the object that originally intervened between the verb and the resultative had to move elsewhere in the sentence. These two conditions are illustrated below.

As discussed above, in a sentence with an action verb, a bare noun in preverbal position is automatically assigned the feature definite and that in postverbal position is automatically assigned the feature indefinite, as illustrated below (cf. Section 7.6.1):

1. (57)

   (a)

   人來了。	(現代漢語)
   Rén	lái-le.
   Person	come-PERF
   “The person has come.”

   (Contemporary Chinese)
   (b)

   來人了。		(現代漢語)
   Lái	rén	le.
   come	person	PERF
   “A person has come.”

   (Contemporary Chinese)

However, the above principle did not exist before the fifth century AD, as illustrated in (58) and (59), where the two nouns in subject position are still interpreted as indefinite.

According to Reference SunSun (1997), the above principle was established around the sixth century AD. The evidence is that the new topicalization construction, where a bare noun was fronted to the beginning of a sentence and interpreted as definite, was formed then, as illustrated in (60) and (61). Meanwhile, an anaphor in the original object position was no longer needed, distinguishing it from the topicalization pattern in Old Chinese (for details, see Section 3.4.3).

The emergence of the disposal construction was a response to the fusion of the verb and the resultative, which was specialized for repositioning the definite patient nouns that originally occurred between the verb and the resultative. At the very beginning, all the patient nouns in the disposal construction had to be interpreted as definite (Reference WangWang 1989: 266‒271). There were two variants of these nouns: first, the nouns were modified by a demonstrative or a definite element, as illustrated in (62) and (63); second, the nouns had no modifier but had to be interpreted as definite, as in (64) and (65):

The process of the formation of the resultative construction was essentially the fusion of the verb and the resultative (for details, see Chapter 6). Before this fusion, if the resultative was an intransitive verb, the definite patient object usually occurred between the verb and the resultative, as illustrated in (66a). After the fusion, however, the most appropriate form for expressing the same meaning was the disposal construction (cf. Sections 5.7, 6.3.1), as illustrated in (66b):

1. (66)

   (a)

   喚江郎覺。			(世說新語·假譎)
   Huàn	Jiāng	Láng		jué.
   call	Jiang	Lang		awake
   “Please wake up Jiang Lang.”

   (Shi Shuo Xin Yu, Jia Jue, AD 450)

   (b)

   把江郎叫醒。		(現代漢語)
   Bǎ	Jiāng	Láng	jiào-xǐng.
   DISP	Jiang	Lang	call-awake
   “Please wake up Jiang Lang.”

   (Contemporary Chinese)

In contrast, if the object was indefinite, the corresponding form in Contemporary Chinese is the VRO structure, where the indefinite patient is the object of the whole VR phrase, as illustrated below:

1. (67)

   (a)

   周仲智飲酒醉。 (世說新語·雅量)
   Zhōu	Zhòngzhì	yǐn		jiǔ	zuì.
   Zhou	Zhongzhi	drink		wine	drunken
   “Zhou Zhongzhi drank wine and became drunk.”

   (Shi Shuo Xin Yu, Ya Liang, AD 450)

   (b)

   周仲智喝醉了酒。 (現代漢語)
   Zhōu	Zhòngzhì	hē-zuì-le		jiǔ.
   Zhou	Zhongzhi	drink-drunken-PERF		wine
   “Zhou Zhongzhi drank wine and became drunk.”

   (Contemporary Chinese)

When the resultative was a preposition phrase to indicate the end point of the verb, before the fifth century AD the patient noun occurred between the verb and the resultative, as illustrated in (68) and (69). Once the verb and the resultative became fused, the patient noun could occur only somewhere prior to the VR predicate. One type of the earliest disposal examples had the predicate with this VR structure, as illustrated below:

From its emergence to the present day, the disposal construction has never been a simple inversion of a corresponding VO sentence, as we discussed above. Roughly speaking, there are two situations in which the disposal construction is used: first, a bare patient noun can be used in either the disposal or a VO construction, both of which are grammatical, but their meanings are different. Specifically, in the disposal construction the noun must be interpreted as definite, and in VO construction it must be indefinite. Second, the bare noun can occur only somewhere prior to the predicate because of the structural complexity of the predicate. These early characteristics of the disposal construction reveal the motivation for its emergence. We have seen some examples in the above analysis. Let us examine the syntactic characteristics of the disposal construction as follows.

When the predicate was a simple transitive verb, the patient noun could occur either in the disposal construction or in an active structure, which produced different interpretations. It had to be interpreted as definite in the disposal construction, as illustrated below.

At this time, the ditransitive construction had already been divided into two subtypes: if the direct object was indefinite, it adopted the traditional unmarked structure “Subj V O_i O_d”; if the direct object was definite, the traditional structure could not be used, and the disposal was the best choice to express the meaning, as illustrated below:

If the matrix verb was followed by another nominal item, which indicated a quantifier, a resultative object, or the parts of the patient noun, the patient noun could no longer follow the predicate and had to be moved elsewhere (Reference LüLü 1984: 176‒199), as discussed in the above section. The disposal construction was the best choice if the patient noun was definite, as illustrated in the following examples:

If the resultative was structurally complex, normally marked by the resultative particle de, the patient noun could no longer follow the matrix verb. In this case, the disposal construction was usually the best choice, as illustrated in (77):

Before the sixth century AD, there was an equal structure, “V X zuò Y,” where the verb could be those meaning “make,” “treat,” “call,” or “name,” corresponding to the English pattern “regard X as Y,” as illustrated in (78). Later, the X element could no longer occur between the verb and the Y element. Then the best way to express the meaning was the disposal construction, as illustrated in (79):

The development of the disposal construction was also related to the change in the comparative structure. As discussed in Chapter 11, the equal comparative structure in Old Chinese was “Subj bǐ O yú Standard,” and until the first century AD the preposition yú was no longer obligatory under the operation of the principle of action–resultative ordering, giving rise to the structure “Subj bǐ O Standard.” After the sixth century AD, these two variants of the comparative developed a subtype of the disposal construction, as illustrated in (80) and (81):

In conclusion, the emergence of the disposal construction was far from simply adding another option to the existing VO structure. It was motivated by the establishment of the resultative construction and the formation of the principle of assigning definiteness by syntactic position, two changes that were closely related to each other. Just these strong motivations propelling its development could have enabled the disposal construction to become a major grammatical device.

9.5 Other Related Constructions

Not long after the disposal construction emerged, the Chinese language acquired another important sentential structure whereby the patient noun simply occurred between the subject and the predicate of the action verb without any marking. This innovative structure served mainly to express an activity. This syntactic construction, which did not exist before the thirteenth century AD, is formulated below:

1. (82) Subj + NP + VP.

According to our investigation, the earliest examples of this structure are attested in the texts of the thirteenth century AD, as illustrated below:

Within the above SOV construction, the predicates of early examples were usually complex, typically VR phrases, as exemplified in (83). If the predicate was a simple verb, a normal VO construction was used, as illustrated in (84):

Since then, this construction has been used to the present day, and the following examples reflect the usage of this SOV construction in Contemporary Chinese:

The SOV structure that was first attested in the thirteenth century AD could be viewed as a variant of the disposal construction. That is, it can be regarded as the unmarked disposal construction. The examples could hardly be transformed into a marked disposal expression by adding the bǎ morpheme, which is probably determined by the semantic feature of the NP after the subject. As the above examples show, this NP is indefinite. In other words, a division of labor exists between marked and unmarked constructions in linguistic expressions: the NP in the disposal construction must be definite, and that in the SOV construction generally must be indefinite or generic.

We should be cautious not to confuse this construction with a sentence whose predicate is another “Subj + VP” structure, forming a “Subj₁ + Subj₂ + VP” structure that had already existed since Old Chinese. In this traditional structure, the second subject typically holds a possessive relationship with the first subject, and the VP was usually an adjectival phrase describing a static quality. More importantly, the second subject could not be the object of the matrix verb, which crucially distinguished it from the newly emerged SOV structure. The following example represents the so-called double subject structure that has been used throughout history:

Our analysis finds strong support in many Chinese dialects. Different dialects usually develop at different rates and also possibly in different directions, which can be seen in the development of the resultative construction and the disposal construction. As discussed above, one of the two major motivations for the emergence of the disposal construction was the fusion of the verb and the resultative via reanalysis. Even now, this process has not been completed in many dialects, especially in the southeastern region of China, and a sign of this lagging is that the verb and the resultative can still be separated by the object, for instance in the Shanghai dialect, as illustrated below. Accordingly, the development of the dialect’s disposal construction lags far behind that of the standard Mandarin dialect (basically northern Chinese), and the use of the disposal construction is much less frequent in these dialects than in standard Mandarin. When the predicate is a “verb–resultative” phrase, the patient noun simply appears between the subject and the predicate in exactly the same new structure as described above, as illustrated below:

In the Shanghai dialect, the patient noun can occur in three positions: (a) between the subject and the predicate, (b) between the verb and the resultative, and (c) after the verb and the resultative. According to Reference HuangHuang (1996: 733‒738), however, in other dialects the patient noun can only precede the “verb + resultative” predicate, as in the Shaoxing dialect, the Jinhua dialect, and the Wenzhou dialect, all of which belong to the Wu dialect family. Additionally, these dialects have a considerable number of the unmarked disposal constructions, namely the SOV construction. In particular, the Jinhua dialect has not even developed a marked disposal construction and only has an unmarked disposal construction. Once again, these facts reveal that there is a cause–effect relation between the resultative construction and the emergence of the disposal construction.

9.6 Disposal Markers: Ná, Guǎn, and Gěi

In the development process of the disposal construction, there were successive lexical replacements that were caused by the grammaticalization of the verb take into a disposal marker. As has been widely assumed, verbs meaning “take” started their grammaticalization processes in the first verb position of the serial verb construction, as schematized below:

1. (90) Subj + VP₁ + VP₂

Among a set of synonymous words, the member with the most general meaning always has the advantage of being recruited to serve a grammatical purpose. For example, of movement verbs in English, including go, walk, run, and stroll, only go became an immediate future marker, “be going to,” because its meaning is most general (Reference Hopper and TraugottHopper and Traugott 2003: 102). As mentioned above, at least four verbs (i.e. jiāng “take,” qǔ “fetch,” chí “grasp,” and zhuō “capture”) were used in the first verb position to express a “disposal” sense, but only jiāng evolved into a disposal preposition through semantic bleaching,Footnote ⁵ resulting in the loss of its verb status. However, the concept of the verb take was needed in daily communication; thus the language community coined another verb bǎ to take over the task around the seventh century AD. Due to its semantic suitability, the verb bǎ was later further grammaticalized into a disposal preposition because it often occurred in the VP₁ position. When bǎ became fully grammaticalized, its verb task was taken over by another newly coined verb, ná, around the twelfth century AD. Recently, ná has also developed into a disposal morpheme (and an instrumental marker) for the same reason, as illustrated below:

Now, ná can express only a small portion of the various functions of bǎ, for instance when used in the “treat-as” pattern, which can be used by bǎ. However, ná has acquired a unique function, as exemplified in (93), and it cannot simply be replaced by bǎ when the predicate is an idiom with a VO structure. The disposal use of ná was first attested in texts in the eighteenth century AD.

In Contemporary Chinese, the variant of the disposal construction with the lowest degree of transitivity, namely the equal structure “X be called Y” (one type of the earliest examples of the construction, attested around the seventh century AD), can be expressed by a newly grammaticalzied morpheme, guǎn, whose lexical meaning is “manage,” as illustrated below:

Only in this specific use can guǎn function like a disposal morpheme, which can also be marked by the disposal bǎ.

The above analysis shows that the verb ná “take” has started to be grammaticalized into a disposal morpheme and can partially function like the disposal bǎ. According to the lexical replacement between jiāng and bǎ, we may reasonably expect that ná may eventually replace bǎ as the major disposal morpheme, a process that may take several centuries or even longer. That is, the effect of grammaticalization is twofold: giving rise to new grammatical devices and triggering lexical replacement.

9.7 Language Contact

As pointed out earlier, some researchers have advocated the idea proposed by Reference Li, Thompson, Anderson and JonesLi and Thompson (1974) that the Chinese language underwent a word order change from SVO to SOV (e.g. Reference HashimotoHashimoto 1976, Reference HuangHuang 1978, Reference Tai and HaimanTai 1985). Reference HashimotoHashimoto (1976, Reference Hashimoto1984) made an even more radical suggestion that Chinese languages exhibit an order continuum from north to south, whereby the northern regions acquire many SOV features that are the result of contact with an Altaic substratum. Reference Sun and TalmySun and Givón (1985) denied these assumptions in a statistical work that showed that OV instances in Contemporary Chinese accounted for less than 10 percent of all the instances they investigated. However, our analysis demonstrates that the emergence of the disposal construction signaled not a typological word order change from SVO to SOV in the Chinese language, but rather a new grammatical device, internally motivated by the reanalysis of the verb and the resultative. As a result, the use of the disposal construction (including the unmarked one) is conditioned by two key factors: the definiteness of the patient noun and the structural complexity of the predicate, two characteristics that are uncommon in a real SOV language. Thus we do not believe that the so-called word order change truly happened in the Chinese language, and there is no sign that the language has gained the momentum to develop toward this basic SOV word order. Nevertheless, due to intensive language contact, many Chinese dialects, especially in the northwestern region of the country, have acquired many features that SOV languages typically exhibit. Specifically, the effect of language contact has been made possible by the emergence of the disposal construction that gave the Chinese dialects a linear order that is truly similar to an SOV language, though they are essentially different.

Historically, the northwestern areas of China were inhabited by many nationalities or ethnic groups, mainly Mongolian, Uygur, and Tibetan, whose languages all adopted the basic SOV word order. Ethnic Han Chinese people and those of other nationalities lived together and communicated with each other every day. Owing to this intensive language contact, the disposal constructions in the Chinese dialects of these areas have indeed developed quite a few remarkable features that are characteristic of SOV languages, some of which are briefly discussed as follows.

In the Lanzhou dialect, the scope of using the disposal construction is much wider than in standard Mandarin; for instance, the verb can be simple and low in transitivity, as illustrated in (94) and (95), which may be judged to be ungrammatical by a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese.

In the disposal construction of the Weinan dialect, the patient noun is often indefinite (e.g. a “Num + CL” phrase) when the predicate is a simple verb, as illustrated in (96) and (97). As discussed above, sentences of this type are considered ill-formed in Standard Chinese (Reference ZhuZhu 1982: 187).

It is quite unusual among the Chinese dialects that the Qinghai dialect has developed a postnominal marker to signal the object status of the patient noun in preverbal position, a morphological device that is typically found in SOV languages (e.g. Japanese) in order to avoid possible ambiguity between the subject and the object. In the following examples, the particle ha indicates that the preceding noun phrase is the object:

According to Reference HuangHuang (1996: 656), in the Qinghai dialect the above examples can also be expressed with a bǎ construction, but the morpheme bǎ must precede the patient noun. It is unlikely that the postnominal accusative case hā grammaticalized from the internal system of the Chinese language because its basic word order is still SVO and the grammatical morphemes are typically grammaticalized in the first VO phrase of a serial verb construction. The case marker ha may not be directly borrowed from the grammar of Tibetan, which is spoken by roughly half the population in the county. We can reasonably assume that the development underwent two steps: first, the number of SOV instances dramatically increased in the Qinghai dialect due to language contact, and then the postnominal object marker emerged from the internal grammatical system of the dialect to satisfy the requirement of communication, similar to what happened in other SOV languages.

9.8 Effect on Other Structures

As discussed in Chapter 8, the direct impetus for the emergence of the passive pattern with an obligatory agent was perhaps the emergence of the disposal construction, a new grammatical structure that was first introduced into the language in the seventh century AD, developed quickly from the tenth century AD to the thirteenth, and spread widely after the fifteenth century AD (for details, see Reference WangWang 1989: 266‒271). We are now in a position to explain the strikingly unusual direction of the development of passive morphemes in the past millennium. The firm establishment of the disposal construction, which required a patient phrase in order to make it well formed, tended to be structurally similar to its structural counterpart, namely the passive structure. Under this circumstance, all passive morphemes after the sixteenth century AD tended to require an agent noun in order to make passive clauses well formed. In contrast, the passive morpheme chī, originating from its “suffer” usage, failed to meet this requirement and hence became extinct around the sixteenth century AD. For the same reason, the dominant bèi passives in early Modern Chinese gradually went out of fashion after the sixteenth century AD, and ultimately became restricted to written language and formal speech in Contemporary Chinese.

In addition, due to analogy with the disposal construction, the passive marker bèi developed into a nominative case marker to signal the subject in preverbal position. In this case, the patient noun still stayed in its original position following the verb, a structure that was never seen before the emergence of the disposal construction, as illustrated in (100). When both the agent and the patient occurred in preverbal position, interestingly, the agent noun was marked by the passive bèi, like a nominative marker, and the patient noun by the disposal bǎ, like an accusative marker, as illustrated in (101). This phenomenon is typically found in an SOV language.

The above phenomenon is regarded as a deviation from the normal development of the passive structure (Reference WangWang 1989: 282). A reasonable explanation for this deviation is that due to the fusion of the verb and the resultative and large-scale use of the disposal construction, a considerable number of patient nouns, especially those with definite meaning, appeared in preverbal position. Some of these were marked by the disposal marker, but some remained unmarked, as discussed above. When both the agent and patient nouns occurred in preverbal position, ambiguity was unavoidable because the word order failed to identify which was the subject and which was the object. To avoid possible ambiguity, therefore, a passive marker was recruited to mark the agent noun, and the disposal marker was specialized to mark the object. That is, here communicative function played a part in triggering the grammatical change, which was actually linked with the bigger picture of the development of the grammatical system at that time.

9.9 Competition between Jiāng and Bǎ

The emergence and development of the disposal construction was one of the major changes in the evolution of Chinese grammar. The verb bǎ “take” grammaticalized into a disposal marker around the eighth century AD, approximately 200 years after the verb jiāng underwent the same change. In the period from the eighth century AD to the twelfth, the disposal jiāng was used more frequently than bǎ, and in many contexts they were interchangeable. After more than a millennium of competition, however, bǎ finally won over jiāng and became the only disposal marker in Standard Contemporary Spoken Chinese at the expense of jiāng around the eighteenth century AD.

It was quite rare that there existed only one lexical candidate for development into a given grammatical morpheme. It was diachronically much more common that more than one lexical item competed within a grammatical domain, and only one eventually became the ultimate winner. In other words, typically, two or more grammatical morphemes from different lexical sources competed for the same function and coexisted for several centuries or even longer. In the end, one of them won at the expense of the others. Superficially, this kind of competition appears random, and the winner seems to be determined purely by chance. In reality, however, the competition is generally regulated by two factors: first, the inherent semantic and syntactic properties of the grammatical morphemes from their original lexical sources, and second, the overall property of the grammatical system in the particular period of time.

All researchers who have studied the disposal construction from a diachronic perspective have treated jiāng and bǎ equally (e.g. Reference WangWang 1989: 266‒271). As analyzed previously, prior to their grammaticalization, they were synonymous when used as a verb, roughly meaning “take.” When used as a verb, however, their meanings were not exactly the same, and a crucial subtle difference existed between them: jiāng meant “lead (take) something from one place to another,” implying a distance change, and bǎ usually referred to a static action more similar to hold in English. This semantic contrast influenced their functions after their grammaticalization. We find that in the same paragraph of texts where both the disposal jiāng and bǎ were used, jiāng was preferred if the patient involved a location change, as illustrated in (102), but ná was favored if there was no such location change, as illustrated in (103). The following examples are quoted from two adjacent sentences of the same text composed in the thirteenth century AD.

Because the original lexical meaning of jiāng implied a location change, it often combined with directive verbs such as lái “come” to appear in the first verb position of a serial verb construction, a verb usage coexisting with its disposal use, as exemplified in (104). In this use, jiāng was still an ordinary verb rather than a disposal marker.

The above example shows that jiāng preserved more verbal properties than bǎ in Modern Chinese, even though the former grammaticalized earlier. Reference SunSun (1996) argued that the directive verb lái introduced a purposive clause after the disposal marker, which was a trigger for the grammaticalization of the disposal construction as a whole. There are two problems with Sun’s analysis: first, the directive lái “come” was usually combined with jiāng but not with bǎ; thus how could it trigger the grammaticalization of the disposal bǎ? Second, a structural hierarchy mistake was made in Sun’s analysis; that is, the directive verb lái was combined with the preceding jiāng to form a VR phrase rather than to introduce a following purposive clause.

More crucially, the factor that determined the fate of jiāng was that it also often introduced a patient NP in postverbal position in Modern Chinese, either definite, as in (105), or indefinite, as in (106), but the disposal bǎ could never do so.

The above uses of jiāng, a very common phenomenon in early Modern Chinese, may have originated from its historical contexts. At the time when jiāng grammaticalized around the fifth century AD, the operation of the principle of action–resultative ordering was still relatively weak; thus the disposal jiāng as a non-resultative preposition could occur in either position, preverbal or postverbal. As the principle eventually became a powerful rule, the postverbal use of the disposal jiāng was eliminated from the grammar. In other words, the postverbal use of the disposal jiāng was inconsistent with the grammatical system at the time, which put it at a disadvantage in the competition with bǎ (always consistent with the general development tendency of the grammar). By the eighteenth century AD, the competition was over: jiāng had been completely replaced by bǎ in Mandarin Chinese. However, jiāng survives in some dialects, such as the Suzhou dialect and the Shanghai dialect, whose resultative construction lagged behind that of northern Chinese; thus the principle has not been finally formed.

The semantics and syntax of a verb prior to its grammaticalization usually determine its functions as a grammatical morpheme. In turn, these inherent features may influence its competition with other related grammatical morphemes that originated from different lexical sources.