Soraj
Ruangmanee and Kingkarn Thepkanjana
<khem17@hotmail.com>, <thepkanjana@gmail.com>
The
Semantic Extension from ‘Acquire’ to ‘Possibility’:
A
Case Study in Thai and Vietnamese
It has been
widely known that the verbs meaning ‘to acquire’ are one of the most polysemous
words in Southeast Asian languages (Auwera 2007, Enfield 2003 and Takahashi
2003). Syntactically, the form with this meaning in a given language can
function as a lexical verb, a preverbal auxiliary and a postverbal auxiliary.
Semantically, in addition to the lexical meaning ‘to acquire’, this form
conveys various grammatical meanings such as simple past, perfective aspect, epistemic
and deontic possibility. This study aims to examine the polyfunctionality of
such verbs in Thai and Vietnamese, namely, ‘dây’ and,
‘được’ , respectively. Based on the semantic map of
modality postulated by van der Auwera (2007) and the metonymy of POTENTIALITY
FOR ACTUALITY proposed by Panther and Thornburg (1999), this study argues for
the grammaticalization path from a lexical verb meaning ‘to acquire’ to a
perfective marker and a modal marker of possibility. It is argued in this study
that the lexical meanings of the two verbs in Thai and Vietnamese, namely,‘dây’
and ‘được’ on the one hand, and the modality and aspect
meanings on the other, are semantically related. The two grammatical meanings
are arguably extended from the same source meaning ‘to acquire’ by means of
cognitive process of metonymy. This grammaticalization path of the verb of
acquiring is widely observed and can be considered a prominent areal feature of
Southeast Asian languages.