“Say What?”: Grammaticalization Paths of Say in some
Formosan and Philippines Languages
Lawrence A. Reid
University of Hawai‘i
The verb say is one of the most common sources of grammaticalization change in various languages of the world. It has been extensively discussed for a wide range of languages, including English (Brinton 2008), African languages (Waley and Armbruster 1934; Lord 1972), Sinitic languages (Chang 1998; Chappell 2008; van Olmen 2011; Lien 2011), and Tibeto-Burman languages (Saxena 1988), but its developments in Austronesian languages have received relatively little attention (Klamer 2000; Hsieh 2011). This paper will trace a wide range of changes involving this verb in a number of Western Austronesian languages (primarily Formosan and Philippine) some of which have not been noted before as developments of the verb say. Heine and Kuteva (2002) give the following eight developments that have been described as grammaticalizations of say: cause, complementizer, conditional, evidential, purpose, quotative, simile, and subordinator. Most of these developments are also found in Formosan and Philippine languages, but in addition we also find developments as various kinds of evidential and attitudinal adverbs, aspectual verbs, interrogative and request forms, indefinite nouns and verbs, possessive pronouns, adverbs of similarity and immediacy, case markers and exonyms. Parallels will be shown where relevant with non-Austronesian languages, and attempts to refine the notion of grammaticalization especially as it involves morphosyntactic changes involving the verb ‘say’ will be made.
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