[Lingtyp] Grammatcalization of 'road/way/path'.

[Mathias Jenny]

Dear Dmitri

Shan (Tai-Kadai, Myanmar) has *táŋ* 'way between two places, road' with
the extended meanings 'antecedent, way, means, cause, raeson'. This noun is
also used as nominalizing prefix on verbs, resulting in action/quality and
object (but never subject/actor) nominalization (*tǎŋ-kǐn *'food',
*táŋ-cɐ́ŋ* 'hatred', *táŋ-mɐj* 'heat, temperature', etc., from the verbs
*kǐn* 'to eat', *cɐ́ŋ* 'to hate', *mɐj* 'be hot' respectively). This
prefix is productive and also occurs with (recent) Burmese loans. In
closely related Thai, the corresponding noun *tʰaːŋ* does not have this
function, but also serves as a locative/proximative preposition.

Best wishes
Mathias

___________________________________

*www.mathiasjenny.ch <http://www.mathiasjenny.ch> *
*www.mathiasjenny.com <http://www.mathiasjenny.com>*


On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 8:11 PM Dmitri Sitchinava <mitrius at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear typologists.
>
> Me and my colleague are interested in grammaticalization patterns with
> nouns meaning 'road/way/path'.
>
> In Svorou (1994) various examples of grammaticalization into spatial grams
> are provided, but examples beyond the spatial domain are probably even more
> interesting.
> The pattern 'way/matter' is also well-known, but to give you a few more
> examples: English intensifier *way* too, French *être en voie de* and
> Swedish *på väg att* (~to be about to), German *wegen* 'because of'. The
> famous *way*-construction (*to V one's way*) is also worth mentioning.
>
> We would appreciate it if you could help us to collect more data so that
> we could get a more diverse sample and would not miss some potentially
> interesting patterns.
>
> Best
> Dmitri
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