Resumen de Formation of the Modern Chinese clause-taking imperative ni kan ‘you see’: a Conjoining pathway account
Haiping Long, Xiaoxiao Du, Mengyue Wu, Francesco Alessio Ursini
The formation of the clause-taking imperative ‘you see’ predicate (of literal meaning) is largely neglected in the discussions of the grammatical changes of ‘you see’ predicates, especially in the discussions of the formation of the parenthetical ‘you see’ predicates. The contextual properties of the Modern Chinese clause-taking imperative ni kan ‘you see’ (e.g., Ni kan ni de zhe ge zhenjiao zhi de tebie de zhengqi. ‘You see, you weave so well that the stitches are extremely neat.’) show that the predicate is not the matrix clause but is a parenthetical clause of the clause that it combines with. The synchronic and diachronic evidence all show that its formation may not be explained as having followed a commonly accepted Matrix Clause pathway, which argues that a clause-taking parenthetical form develops from a corresponding matrix clause structure. Rather, its formation may be expediently explained as having followed a hypothesized Conjoining pathway that essentially involves the loss of the phonetic gap between a prosodically separated parenthetical ni kan and the clause that it combines with.
