Zhao Xin
Yuan baihua(a.k.a. the vernacular Chinese in Yuan Dynasty), the character 有(yǒu)commonly used at the end of a sentence appears in two constructions: “N+有”, which indicates “exists in N” or “possesses N”, and “V(+particle)+有(+particle)”, which conveys various aspectual information of V. In the bilingual speakers’ spoken text Zhèngtǒng Línróng Lù(正统临戎录), composed in early Ming, the usage of “N+有” to express time began to emerge marking an extension of the locational “N+有” construction in bilingual speech. The previous “V+有” construction attained new functions to indicate future tense and imperative mood, suggesting a divergence between spoken and written language, where the spoken “V+有” specifically indicates “present,” aligning with the presentfuture tense suffixes in Middle Mongolian, the former subsequently adopted the future and imperative usages of the suffixes. This case illustrates two points: first, language contact documents involving different producers and users exhibit both distinctions and connections, warranting a categorized investigation; second, the different syntactic functions of polysemous functional morphemes may also undergo semantic/functional transfer, occurring not only in indirect contact but also in direct contact.
