Ambiguity in Context-induced Semantic Changes: The History of the Chinese ba Construction
[译]：语境导致歧义的语义变化：汉语把字结构的历史
Chaofen Sun 孙朝奋

Abstract 摘要

1. INTRODUCTION
This paper shows how contexts play an important role in shaping the Modern Mandarin BA construction in history. The categorical change of BA from a verb into a preposition in history resulted from semantic changes that were characterized by semantic ambiguities. BA, in Old Chinese, was a verb meaning “to take, to hold” and was first changed into a mentally oriented abstract verb indicating affectedness in Middle Chinese. This metonymic change may have been at the same time metaphorical as it evolved in analogy with the Old Chinese synonymous verb YI. Furthermore, concurrent with BA’s loss of its verbal status around the 19th century, it was transformed into a metalinguistic marker of high transitivity and became correlated to referential nominals and temporally bounded propositions. At the same time, BA lost its instrumental function. It was found from the uses of YI and BA in Old and Middle Chinese that the meaning associated with high transitivity, as well as the instrumental meaning, may directly derive from BA’s verbal meanings, but the rise of its attitudinal meaning was probably mediated through constructions that are related to the instrumental reading.

2. THE MODERN MANDARIN BA CONSTRUCTION

3. THE OLD CHINESE BA AND YI CONSTRUCTIONS

4. THE EARLY BA CONSTRUCTION
4.1 BA’s Grammatical Status and the Purposive Construction
4.2 Two Metonymic Processes
4.2.1 The Old Chinese YI construction
4.2.2 The Middle Chinese BA construction
4.3 A Metaphorical Process

5. THE GRAMMATICALIZATION OF BA
5.1 Loss of Instrumental Meaning and the Emergence of the Referential Constraint
5.2 The Constraint of Temporal Boundedness

6. SUMMARY