Morphosyntactic features of Old Chinese causatives and their relationship with Tibeto-Burman (original) (raw)

Across Tibeto-Burman (hereafter TB) languages we find causatives expressed both through morphological means (a prefix on the verb, a difference in the voicing and/or aspiration of the initial consonant, a change in tone, or a combination of these types of marking) and through syntactic means, using a verb meaning "to do" or "to cause" as an auxiliary in collocation to a main verb to create a causative construction. 1 A similar pattern is found across Sinitic languages as well, but while across Sinitic the morphological means are mere residues, across TB languages they are still productive, in various degrees. The causative auxiliaries used across the TB languages are related, but we do not seem to be able to trace them back to a single proto-TB pattern; as for the morphological means, according to LaPolla 2003, we can reconstruct at least three types of derivational morphology at the Sino-Tibetan (hereafter ST) level: *sprefix, voicing alternations and *-s suffix. These three types are at the origin of a large number of Old Chinese (hereafter OC) doublets of causative/simplex verbs, like 敗 bai (*prats) "to defeat" (V2) / bai (*N-prats>*brats) "to be defeated" (V1), 2 reconstructed from Middle Chinese (hereafter MC) collections of reading glosses (like the Jingdian Shiwen 經典釋文) and rhyme books.