‘Passing’ is ‘Giving’ - Polyfunctionality of the ti⁴² Construction in Tunxi Hui Chinese

The morpheme ti⁴² ‘give’ is a polysemous morpheme in Tunxi Hui Chinese, a little-studied Hui Sinitic languages with about 140,000 speakers in Tunxi City, Anhui Province of China. This paper sets out to examine the distribution and mechanism of the radical polyfunctionality of ti⁴², with particular attention paid to the allative, locative and temporal markers, which are rarely reported in the literature. By first-hand synchronic data and phonological reconstruction, we find out that ti⁴² originated as a SEND-type verb *diai6 ‘pass’ in Medieval Chinese, which has extended to a general ditransitive verb ‘give’ in modern Tunxi Hui. During this process, it has developed into two separate grammaticalization clines, one from ‘pass’ to the allative, locative and temporal markers, and the other from ‘give’ to recipient, beneficiary, purpose, permissive and passive markers. The polysemy of ti⁴² involves complex processes of semantic extension from ‘pass’ to ‘give’, and language-internal and contact-induced polygrammaticalization.