AN ETYMOLOGICAL STUDY OF DISPOSAL AND PASSIVE MARKERS IN HUNAN DIALECTS

In Mandarin, the disposal marker is 把 pa^3 and the passive marker is 被 pei^4. These markers do not derive from the same lexical source. In some localities of Hunan, however, these two types of markers may derive from the same lexical source. Moreover, there are aberrant disposal markers which do not derive from 把 pa^3 and passive markers which do not derive from 被 pei^4. According to my investigations in 107 localities in Hunan, twenty forms can be employed as disposal markers and thirty five can be employed as passive markers. In this paper, the distribution of disposal and passive markers across dialects in Hunan will be presented. The path of grammaticalization of these two types of markers will be revealed by the analysis of their etymology in the Hunan dialects. There are clear cut distinctions between the two types of markers in the Hunan dialects geographically. In the Mandarin-speaking area, the main pattern is that the disposal 'to give' contrasts with passive 'to suffer'; in the Xiang-speaking area, the main usage is that the disposal and the passive markers derive from a pair of synonyms meaning 'to give'; in the Gan and Kejia speaking area, the main pattern is that the disposal marker 'to take' contrasts with the passive marker 'to give'; and in the southern area, where both a Mandarin dialect and unclassified local dialects co-exist, the main usage is that the disposal and the passive markers derive from the same form 'to give'. I propose that not only are the lexical sources of the passive/disposal markers in the Hunan dialects different from Mandarin, but also that the path of grammaticalization is also different. The first step of grammaticalization of disposal/passive markers meaning 'to give' occurred with a re-analysis that changed the verb 'to give' into a preposition indicating relationship between a subject and an object in a double-object construction.