The Properties and Explanatory Power of Exaptation:A Revisit of the Emergence of Chinese Adverb Ye(也)'Likewise'
Exaptation,which exists cross-linguistically but is much less frequent than grammaticalization,occurs when functional items are highly grammaticalized and declining.Some scholars may argue that an exaptatum typically has the"junk"status(i.e.,completely functionless or useless).However,this is problematic because linguistic morphemes are rarely fully devoid of meaning and really functionless.Currently it is widely accepted that the most defining properties of exaptation are"unexpectedness"and"novelty".Exaptation is unexpected in the sense that the development of the new function of an exaptatum presents a leap-like shift and cannot be predicted by any diachronic morphosyntactic rule and recurrent pathway.The result of exaptation is novel because the new function the exaptatum obtains was formerly not associated with it.As a leap-like shift,exaptation is different from degrammaticalization,which,similar to grammaticalization,is motivated by pragmatic inference and has a transitional phase.However,it is not easy to draw a clear line between exaptation and the absorption of contextual meaning,as evidence shows that in some exaptation cases the source of functions of the exapted elements are clearly related to the contextual meanings.Exaptation may be useful with respect to the study of the diachronic morphosyntactic cases that have long puzzled the scholars.One such example is the history of the Chinese adverb ye(也),which has the sense of'likewise.'Some scholars believe that the adverb ye has its origin as a modal particle in Old Chinese.However,neither of the two mechanisms,i.e.,the absorption of contextual meaning and degrammaticalization,as proposed by these scholars,is convincing.Since Middle Chinese,the modal particle ye has started to decline in vernacular in the sense that it became statistically less frequent and its occurrence became optional.This,together with the fact that no immediate connection may be found between the modal particle ye and the adverb ye,makes the change from the former to the latter a clear case of exaptation.In Chinese,the adverb ye may not be the sole exaptation case.The possessive marker de,the proximal demonstrative zhe,the distal proximal demonstrative na,and the plural marker men,have long been controversial with respect to the sources,pathways and mechanisms behind.As the roles of the recurrent pathways and primary mechanisms(e.g.,grammatica-lization,degrammaticalization,or absorption of contextual meaning)have been denied,exaptation may be a possible answer.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
