Phonological reduction and grammaticalization:

Examples from the Southern Min dialect of Hui’an

Weirong CHEN* & Wuxiang WU**

INTRODUCTION

Grammaticalization has been a hot topic in linguistics, as can be seen from a

great deal of work which has been done during the past three decades, e.g.
Lehmann (1982), Heine & al. (1991), Traugott & Heine (1991), and Hopper &
Traugott (2003). As proposed by Hopper & Traugott (2003: xv),
grammaticalization is ‘the change whereby lexical items and constructions come
in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once
grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions’. More
specifically, the changes that a grammaticalizing item undergoes in the process of
grammaticalization usually involve at least three different areas of language:
morphosyntax, semantics and phonology (Heine & Reh 1984; Ansaldo 1999;
Heine & Kuteva 2007). In this paper, we will focus on phonological change,
paying special attention on Sinitic languages, languages of isolating and tonal
type, which have been comparatively neglected within the literature.
In the literature of historical linguistics such as Trask (1996) and Campbell
(1999), phonological change refers to all types of change in pronunciation and
falls into two types: (a) non-phonemic change: the change in the sequence of
* The University of International Business and Economics, China. E-mail: lotuscwr@
gmail.com
** Institute of Linguistics, The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China. E-mail:

wufuxiang100@126.com
Acknowledgements : An earlier version of this study was presented at IACL-20 in Hong
Kong on August 29, 2012. This research was partially supported by a postgraduate
studentship from the University of Hong Kong, by the ERC project “Sinotype” under
grant agreement n0230388, by the Major Program of the National Social Science
Foundation of China (Grant No. 14ZDB098), by the Valency-Reducing Phenomena
projects based at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPU 4-ZZAP and RGC GRF
PolyU Project No. 154055/14H), by an internal grant from the University of International
Business and Economics, Beijing (UIBE XK2014303), and by the Fundamental Research
Funds for the Central Universities in UIBE (13QD21). We wish to thank the editors and
anonymous reviewers, and Prof. Stephen Matthews, Prof. Hilary Chappell, Prof. Alain
Peyraube, Prof. Chu-Ren Huang, Prof. Shengli Feng, Prof. San Duanmu, Dr. Foong Ha
Yap, Dr. Umberto Ansaldo, Dr. Picus Ding, Dr. Jian Wang, Dr. Hilario de Sousa, and Dr.
Xuping Li for their valuable comments.
166 Weirong Chen & Wuxiang Wu

speech sounds making up the pronunciation of a particular word such as lenition

and fortition; and (b) phonemic change: the change which affects the number of
phonemes in the language (Trask 1996: 52-76; Campbell 1999: 19).
Phonological change observed in grammaticalization, however, is often
characterized as reduction: loss in phonological substance, e.g. loss of
phonological segments such as vowel, and loss of supra-segmental properties
such as tone1 (Lehmann 1982; Heine & Reh 1984: 16-27; Hopper & Traugott
2003: 154; Heine & Kuteva 2007: 34-43). Thus, phonological reduction2 has
been regarded as a symptom of grammaticalization (Heine et al. 1991; Hopper &
Traugott 2003; Heine & Kuteva 2007). However, phonological reduction is
neither peculiar to grammaticalization (it may be normal phonological change),
nor necessarily involved in grammaticalization (Hopper & Traugott 2003;
Schiering 2006; Heine & Kuteva 2007).
More and more attention is being paid to grammaticalization in Sinitic
languages since Peyraube 1991 (e.g. Wu & Hong 2003; Ansaldo & Lim 2004;
Shen et al. 2007). However, little research has been done to systematically study
phonological reduction involved in grammaticalization, or, in other words, study
phonological reduction from the perspective of grammaticalization. For example,
Xing (2012) presents an overview of recent developments in the study of
grammaticalization in Chinese, yet, it has almost nothing about phonological
reduction.
Previous studies on phonological reduction involved in grammaticalization in
Sinitic languages include Jiang (1999), Ansaldo & Lim (2004) and Schiering
(2006). Jiang (1999) examines phonological reduction involved in
grammaticalization of zhuo着 ‘attach’ with examples from Mandarin and Jin
varieties. In discussing grammaticalization and typology, Ansaldo (1999: 23-24)
mentions that ‘When looking at grammaticalization processes in Sinitic…we find
that…phonological reduction often does not occur’. This may be true when we
look at Sinitic languages in general, especially compared to some other languages
in the world. This, however, may require a systematic examination of
phonological change involved in grammaticalization in different varieties of
Sinitic languages. Interestingly, Ansaldo & Lim (2004) find that grammatical
morphemes show phonetic erosion, primarily in terms of duration and vowel
quality, when compared to their lexical counterparts in Cantonese and Hokkien in
Singapore. In Schiering (2006), Mandarin Chinese serves as an example of tonal
languages where prosodic and segmental reduction such as neutralization of tonal
contrasts and vowel centralization are involved in clitics.
Unlike Ansaldo & Lim (2004) which focuses on reduction in terms of duration
and vowel quality etc., this paper focuses on more ‘typical’ phonological
reduction such as the loss of vowel or tone, and syllable fusion. We find ample
1 Tone is traditionally regarded as a prosodic feature. However, Duanmu (2000) argues
that tone can be considered as a segmental feature.
2 The term ‘phonetic reduction’ is often used as an alternative term of ‘phonological
reduction’ in the literature of grammaticalization.