Passive and permissive constructions in Cantonese : an LFG account

Abstract

This dissertation is a study on Cantonese passive and permissive ‘bei2畀’ constructions under the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Widely considered as the result of grammaticalization of the lexical verb ‘bei2畀’ (give), passive and permissive ‘bei2畀’ possess chameleonic characteristics which raise controversies in the analysis of the so-called ‘give-bei2’ constructions in Cantonese. In this thesis, I start with looking at the different uses of ‘bei2畀’ attested in the corpus and focus on the development from give ‘bei2畀’ to permissive ‘bei2畀’ and passive ‘bei2畀’. The morpho-syntactic features of permissive ‘bei2畀’and passive ‘bei2畀’show that they lie on different stages of the same path of grammaticalization. Through disambiguating sentences with possible interpretation of passive and permissive, I demonstrate that permissive ‘bei2畀’ exhibits the features of a bridging context. I argue that permissive ‘bei2畀’ is semantically bleached and serves as a light verb in a complex predicate. The morpheme plays a functional role in providing information about the type of event. On the other hand, though an indirect passive ‘bei2畀’ construction and a permissive ‘bei2畀’ construction appear to share the same structure, the two ‘bei2畀’ are essentially different. It is also revealed that passive ‘bei2畀’ lacks verbal properties and thus is non-predicative itself. Therefore, there is no such constituent as a ‘bei2畀-phrase’. The propositional meaning of the construction and information about the arguments are contributed solely by the main verb. With the ground well set, I argue that the function of ‘bei2畀’ is to contribute the passive voice feature to the construction and should be represented as an attribute in the f-structure. After that, I account for the formation of a widely acknowledged but under-studied subtype of Cantonese passives generally known as Indirect Passives. I identify the discourse function of the subject in indirect passives and propose that indirect passive is the result of topicalizing part of the argument in passivization. Given that topic is expressed in the subject role, I argue that the patient NP is forced to remain in its canonical object position. In other words, the indirect passive is a construction with object in-situ. The proposal is supported by the accusative case marking on the patient NPs in indirect passive constructions in other languages. Finally, I highlight that while it is important to capture universal features of syntactic phenomena, special attention needs to be paid to typological characteristics to achieve an adequate syntactic study of Cantonese.