Passing is Giving: The Origin and Historical Development of the Polyfunctional Morpheme ti⁴² in Tunxi Hui Chinese

This paper focuses on the origin of a polyfunctional morpheme ti⁴² in Tunxi Hui Chinese, a little-studied Hui Sinitic language with about 140,000 speakers in Tunxi City, Anhui Province of China. This versatile morpheme represents a radical syncretism among nine disparate functions, including that between the lexical verb ‘give’ and the allative, locative and temporal marking, which is seldom reported in the literature. By first-hand synchronic data and the historical comparative method, we propose 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 sheds light on the complex processes of semantic shift from ‘pass’ to ‘give’, and language-internal and contact-induced polygrammaticalization.