Transitivity, the BA construction and its history
及物性, 把字句, 及其历史
Chaofen Sun 孙朝奋

Abstract 摘要
This paper tries to account for the correlations between the Mandarin BA construction and its distributional properties in terms of transitivity. First, with a BA construction, the nominal immediately following BA cannot have a non-specific reading. Second, no monosyllabic verb can co-occur with the BA construction without an aspect marker, a verbal quantifier, reduplicating the verb, etc. It is hypothesized that these properties simply follow from the fact that BA functions to mark a high degree of transitivity. Cross-linguistic evidence will be given to show that word order, referential properties of the syntactic object, and the temporal structure of a sentence all have a bearing on the notion of transitivity. They co-vary to indicate a higher or lower degree of transitivity (Hopper & Thompson 1980). The second part of the paper gives a brief review of the history of BA and attempts to show that it was about the turn of this century that BA became totally grammaticalized into a preposition-like marker of high transitivity from its original verbal uses and its derived use in Middle Chinese as a patient marker.

本文通过应用动词及物性的理论观点，着重研究把字句的句法分布特点，如紧接着把字的名词不能泛指，把字句中的单音节动词在没有重叠的情况下，必须与时态助动词或数量结构同时使用等等等等。世界上很多语言，动词宾语的词序和所指意义以及句子时貌结构的不同，均与及物性意念高低有关。本文的第二部分讨论把字在中古作为受事标记的用法并指出把字作为一个介词性表及物性高的标记的有关用法，是在十九世纪才完全虚化而成。

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