An apprehensive marker in Baoding (Sinitic)
Résumé
This paper aims to examine the apprehensive function of a sentence-final enclitic particle =lɛ.ia in Baoding dialect, a Mandarin dialect spoken in Northern China (Sinitic). This particle is restricted to future situations and it is related to speaker vs. addressee involvement: its main pragmatic function is to require the addressee’s involvement in order to avoid a potential undesirable situation. It mainly but not exclusively appears in independent clauses and originally has a temporal function. In this paper, we examine the semantic and syntactic constraints weighing on =lɛ.ia, its various functions, and we discuss the predicates that it co-occurs with. We argue that the apprehensive function of =lɛ.ia is a semantic extension of its temporal function as an imminent future marker. We also investigate the possible source of the particle: =lɛ.ia functions as a single unit but can be traced to two sentence-final enclitic particles: =lɛ which marks change of state, and =ia marking imminent future. These data on the Baoding dialect do not only fill a gap in providing detailed data on apprehensional morphology in a broad sense from a Sinitic language, but also point to subtle semantic variations and restrictions in the grammatical expression of undesirability.