From separate clause to epistemic adverbial, the neglected source construction and initial-to-medial pathway: Chinese guoran ‘it really happens’

ABSTRACT

The source construction and the pathway for the formation of English epistemic adverbials are widely discussed in the literature. However, few studies to our knowledge have specifically discussed a hypothetical source construction of separate clauses and a hypothetical initial-to-medial pathway. Chinese guoran was first used as a separate clause, and later developed into an epistemic adverbial meaning ‘it really happens’. Diachronic investigations reveal that it followed a hypothetical initial-to-medial pathway leading from a clause-initial position to a clause-medial position. The hypothetical source construction and the hypothetical pathway are supported by diachronic changes of other epistemic adverbials in Chinese, and may be adopted to account for the formation of some epistemic adverbials in the other languages.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic adverbial
• guoran
• separate clause
• initial-to-medial pathway

Acknowledgements

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their enlightening comments and suggestions; the first author also thanks the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for sponsoring the research fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

This paper is based on the referenced resources available in the public domain.

Notes

1 By separate clauses, we mean clauses that are not relative clauses, matrix clauses or complement clauses (including subject complement clauses and object complement clauses) of other clauses.

2 Adverbial structures are notoriously fuzzy between being adverbial phrases and being adverbs. In this study, following Bussmann (2006, p. 1060), Swan (1984, 1986, 1991), and Swan and Breivik (2011), we use the term adverbials to cover both terms.

3 The author still adheres to the hypothetical source of superordinate clauses for the formation of these EAs. According to her, these EAs are formed by analogy of the EAs that have developed from the corresponding superordinate clauses.

4 http://ling.cuc.edu.cn/RawPub/

5 Notice that in the original Modern Chinese text, there is no prosodic gap between guoran and the rest of the sentence. We are adding the prosodic gap here only because the translation is otherwise ungrammatical in English. This also applies to the translations of the other sentence-medial guoran examples to be discussed in this study.

6 Guoran in Old Chinese may also mean ‘be full’; see the following example.

Table

According to Sun (2014, p. 38), the ‘it was really like that’ meaning of guoran did not develop from its ‘be full’ meaning.

7 Guoran is no longer used as an affirmative clause in Modern Chinese.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China under [grant number 20BYY159]; National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (CN).

Notes on contributors

Haiping Long

Haiping Long is a professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests lie in grammaticalization, linguistic typology, historical linguistics and discourse grammar.

Francesco Ursini

Francesco Ursini is a professor at the Central China Normal University, School of Chinese Language and Literature. His research focuses on spatial case markers and discourse markers, across different frameworks and languages.

Bernd Heine

Bernd Heine is an Emeritus Professor at the Institut für Afrikanistik, University of Cologne. He has published over 40 books and more than 150 journal articles, and has held visiting professorships in Europe, Eastern Asia (Japan, Korea, China), Australia, Africa (Kenya, South Africa), North America (University of New Mexico, Dartmouth College) and South America (Brazil).

Yaohua Luo

Yaohua Luo is a professor at the School of Literature, Journalism & Communication, South-Central Minzu University. His research interests lie in grammaticalization, typology and diachrony of Chinese grammatical structures. He has published over 60 articles and three books in the above fields.