Common Chinese and early Chinese morphology.

• Author: Branner, David Prager

1. INTRODUCTION

   THIS PAPER CONSIDERS some modern dialect data that is relevant to the question of morphology in early Chinese. (1) Morphology consists of the principles governing word formation, especially the processes of inflection (regular changes a word undergoes) and derivation (affixation). The distinction between inflection and derivation originates with Marcus Terrentius Varro (116-27 8.C.E.), who called them "natural declension" and "voluntary declension" (Taylor 1995). That distinction may, however, be somewhat artificial in languages not of Greco-Roman origin. While these processes, especially inflection, are not usually considered present in Chinese on any large scale, a number of morphological functions have been posited for early Chinese and incorporated into reconstructions. Serious work was pioneered by French-trained sinologists, above all Henri Maspero (1883-1945). An early attempt, and the one perhaps best known to the greater linguistic world, is the ablaut case-system that Bernhard Karlgren proposed for early Chinese personal pronouns (1920), although that hypothesis was decisively demolished on philological grounds by George Kennedy (1956). Laurent Sagart's innovative Roots of Old Chinese (1999) is a recent effort to assemble evidence for the larger question of early morphology, and I shall examine here the two of Sagart's proposals that I consider the best supported.

   In another paper (Branner 1998) I have attempted to document the different backgrounds of the Western and native Chinese approaches to the evidence for early morphology. Premodern Chinese scholars, of course, historically treated nearly all grammatical issues within the restrictively lexicographic model inherited from the Han scholia. A number of early Manchu-period scholars took this model to an extreme degree, which I have termed "purist." The Western treatment of early Chinese, in contrast, seems from earlier times to have viewed the absence of an obvious derivational system as a kind of defect, to be remedied by the reconstruction of "lost" morphology. The "purist" and "reconstructionist" models are treated in detail in my 1998 paper, but I shall have a few words to say about them at the end of this one.

   The reconstruction of early Chinese has depended most heavily on coordinating medieval phonology with early rhyming and xiesheng [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] character structure. Although a certain number of reconstructed early Chinese features find support in the most conservative modern dialects, dialect evidence has been no more than a peripheral element in the study of early Chinese. In the case of early Chinese morphology, however, the usual sources can contribute very little, and scholars tend to turn for support to Tibeto-Burman languages and their reconstructed ancestor, proto-Tibeto-Burman. Reconstructed proto-Tibeto-Burman is not thought to be Chinese, however, nor any form of Chinese; it is a sister language to early Chinese, believed by its proponents to share a common ancestor with Chinese. For this reason, morphology in reconstructed Tibeto-Burman might be projected backwards into proto-Sino-Tibetan, but it makes relatively weak evidence for morphology in early Chinese itself. Even when comparable phonetic tokens can be identified in early Chinese, there is a methodological problem in interpreting them by way of Tibeto-Burman, moving as it were first backward to the putative ancestor and then forward into early Chinese. Much stronger would be native morphology in established forms of Chinese. It is with such internal Chinese evidence that this paper is concerned.

   For the purposes of discussion here I introduce the concept of "Common Chinese," meaning a notional metasystem comprising all modern varieties of Chinese (also Branner 2000: 160-66). True morphology, if it did once exist, is no longer productive in Common Chinese. That is, productive examples of morphology may easily be identified in many individual varieties of Chinese, but no such system has been found in a wide variety of dialects, nor does any appear relatable to a single, ancestral system. It is simplest to view them as having arisen independently or preserving older systems that were always regional. Examples that can be related to mainstream Classical evidence, on the other hand, are vanishingly rare. For instance, diminution and nominalization in many varieties of Northern Chinese are accomplished by rhotacization:

   plain form: huh [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'to paint'; "painting" as a bound form nominalized: huar [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'painting' plain form: mri qi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'to be winded, out of breath' diminuted: mei qir [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'to have died, passed one's last breath' (2) No phonologically comparable diminutive process is found in Classical evidence or reported for the other major dialect groups, so diminution and nominalization by rhotacization cannot be assigned to "Common Chinese" as I have defined it, only to the Northern group. (3)

   Morphology in early Chinese is studied using three principal kinds of data. They are essentially different, though scholars agree that they should be seen as ultimately interdependent: A) internal evidence from the written phonological tradition; B) comparisons with Tibeto-Burman morphology; C) evidence internal to spoken Chinese languages, if possible apart from influence by the written phonological tradition, that is, lower diglossic registers or styles of Chinese. (4)

   The best-known Classical example of morphology belongs to both types A and B, but not C--the derivation by tone change treated by Zhou Zumo [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1966[1946]), Gordon Downer (1959), and Tsu-lin Mei (1980). There are several different processes evident in the medieval sources, apparently not all of the same date, but the best known is the case of verbs that become nominalized when they change from their original tone into the qusheng [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] tone category; that is an example of category A, above. The qusheng tone category is thought to have originated in an early Chinese final *-s. It is this *-s that would have had the actual derivational function. (5)

   plain verbal form: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] zhi {[tri.sub.3b]}

   In this paper I am chiefly concerned with evidence belonging to category C, which seems to me the most neglected and most difficult to find of the three types. A morphological system that remains productive today and is not restricted to a single, cohesive dialect group would be powerful evidence of its presence in the early language.

   Few clear examples of the modern survival of early Chinese morphology have been described in print until recently. (Of course, material of this kind has scarcely been a prominent target of field research in Chinese before now, so other cases may simply be waiting to be noticed.) One example was proposed by Edwin Pulleyblank in his article on word families: he proposed relating the Min [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] contrast between aspirated and unaspirated obstruent initials in lower register tones to the Tibetan 'a-chung or "voiced h" prefix (1973:114). However, although the Min contrast may perhaps be the relic of an earlier morphological process, that process is certainly no longer active in attested Min dialects. Note, too, that South Coblin (1995) has shown the 'a-chung symbol in Tibetan itself to have been a diacritic of varying usage, and not by any means simply a laryngeal sound, prefix or otherwise, so that this example may not be viable without further evidence.

   Another example was proposed by Chang Song-hing and Li Rulong (1992). They cite some twenty pairs of words in which nasal and stop endings alternate in colloquial Minnan words of related meanings. For instance:

   /[uan.sup.1]/ ~ /[uat.sup.7]/ 'to turn, bend'; /[khim.sup.2]/ ~ /[khip.sup.8]/ 'to catch in the hand'. They consider this alternation to be an example of "derivation" (paisheng [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) but do not explain the nature of the semantic relationship involved. They also do not say whether it is productive, but my field experience leads me to think it is not. There are many comparable examples in medieval and early Chinese, and that would seem to hold promise for the recovery of a true Common Chinese morphological pattern, except that the nature of the semantic relationship has never been pinned down satisfactorily. The term Chang and Li use for the relationship between nasal and stop endings is yang-ru duizhuan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "interchange between nasal and stop codas," introduced by the philologist Kong Guangsen [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1752-1786) in his study of early Chinese rime groups (1966[1800: 1.2b]). In early Chinese, too, the semantic relationship between forms displaying this alternation has never been pinned down. Without knowing the nature of the relationship, it is hard to settle an opinion on the significance of Chang and Li's data. Perhaps future fieldwork will give us more complete data with which to advance that investigation.

   Let us return to the question of comparative evidence for morphology. To date, the feature cited by Pulleyblank is found in Chinese only within Min, and the specific forms cited by Chang and Li only within Minnan. The goal of genetic classification demands, to my mind, that relics ought to be attested in at least two different sources of evidence, otherwise what we suspect to be reliquary may well be a local development or borrowing that ought not to be reconstructed into earlier forms of the common language. Two different sources of evidence could mean two significantly different dialect groups, or it could imply clear, mainstream ancient evidence as well as evidence from a modern dialect.

   Among the many features proposed by Laurent Sagart, two meet this criterion. As it happens, each of them...