Open AccessCoping with Complex Polysemy: A Comparison of Dative/Benefactive Constructions in Mandarin and Thai
Author(s) -
Karen E. Hermann
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
proceedings of the annual meeting of the berkeley linguistics society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2377-1666
pISSN - 0363-2946
DOI - 10.3765/bls.v5i0.3259
Subject(s) - dative case , polysemy , mandarin chinese , linguistics , verb , confusion , psychology , causative , computer science , philosophy , psychoanalysis
In Mandarin and Thai, many prepositions have etymologically and semantically related homonyms that are members of other lexical classes. In Mandarin these homonyms can be verbs, and in Thai they may be verbs or substantives. In both languaes there exists a benefactive/goal preposition (gei in Mandarin, hai in Thai) which is homonymous with a common verb that has extensive dative and causative usage. In this article I compare the syntactic and semantic characteristics of dative/benefactive constructions in the two languages, and conclude with the hypothesis that certain striking similarities that will be seen reflect a trend to avoid the possible confusion that could result from these closely parallel cases of complex polysemy.