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Issues on the Adverb 其 qí in Archaic Chinese

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New Perspectives on Aspect and Modality in Chinese Historical Linguistics

Part of the book series: Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics ((FiCL,volume 5))

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Abstract

This chapter explores into the meanings and distributions of the adverb 其 qí in Archaic Chinese texts. Before doing this, several constructions consisting of 其 qí (“WH-elements + 其 qí + VP”, “与其yŭqí + VP1,不如/宁bùrú/nìng + VP2”) were reassessed in Sect. 4.2, and instances of 其 qí in these constructions are found to be pronouns rather than adverbs, this was partly because the adverb 其 qí seldom appears with assertive SFPs and can not appear with casual WH-phrases. The analysis in Sect. 4.3 also shows that three meanings of 其 qí can be attested in Archaic Chinese (future tense meaning, epistemic meaning and deontic meaning), the contributor argues for a distinction between future time meaning and epistemic meaning because the former is interpreted lower in the clausal architecture than the latter, this is evident by their linear ordering relative to some benchmark operators in clauses. Section 4.4 focuses on the epistemic modal adverb 其 qí, whose pragmatic characteristics were identified by virtue of grammatical distributions (e.g. collocational preference of SFPs and clausal types).

The author is indebted to Barbara Meisterernst and Alain Peyraube for improving this draft by their valuable comments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although 谁 shuí is permitted to precede 其 qí, there are only 3 examples of 谁其 shuíqí in Archaic texts, whereas the figure for 其谁 qíshuí is 43 examples. 谁其 shuíqí may be a residue reflecting the word order of Early Archaic Chinese, in which period 其 qí still preserved the properties of an auxiliary, this is evidenced by the presence of 不其 bùqí, 未其 wèiqí, and 弗其 fúqí in OBI and 尚书 shàngshū (Djamouri 2001: 165). This is inspired from the discussion with Edith Aldridge.

  2. 2.

    Chou 周法高 (1975: 291) regarded 维 wéi and 惠 huì as two written variants of the same morpheme, but he did not say anything about their category labels.

  3. 3.

    It is generally accepted that 莫 mò is an indefinite pronoun that exclusively serves as the subject in a clause. Wei 魏培泉 (1999), however, argued that 莫 mò is actually a quantifier serving as an adverbial in clauses like (47).

  4. 4.

    Pulleyblank (1995: 89) noticed that 實 shí is used to recapitulate the subject and mark it as contrastive.

  5. 5.

    According to Guo 郭昭军 (2003), 大概 dàgài expresses a higher degree of likelihood than 也许 yěxǔ, which is situated in the middle of the likelihood scale (i.e. 50% probability). This is evidenced by the fact that the latter can occur in ‘Adv VP, Adv negVP’ but the former cannot. For example, 他也许/*大概来, 也许/*大概不来 tā yěxǔ/*dàgài lái, yěxǔ/*dàgài bùlái ‘He may/*probably come or may/*probably not’.

  6. 6.

    Due to the very low frequencies of 或 huò, 或者 huòzhě and 其諸 qízhū, this investigation is supplemented with examples from a total of 9 Western Han texts, including 史記 shǐjì, 禮記 lǐjì, 大戴禮 dàdàilǐ, 公羊傳 gōngyángzhuàn, 穀梁傳 gǔliángzhuàn, 春秋繁露 chūnqiūfánlù, 鹽鐵論 yántiělùn, 新序 xīnxù, 說苑 shuōyuàn.

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  1. Nankai University, Tianjin, China

    Feng Gu

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  1. National Tsing Hua University, Institute of Linguistics, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Barbara Meisterernst

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Gu, F. (2019). Issues on the Adverb 其 qí in Archaic Chinese. In: Meisterernst, B. (eds) New Perspectives on Aspect and Modality in Chinese Historical Linguistics. Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, vol 5. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1948-8_4

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