The Syntactic Grounding and Conceptualization of Hakka BUN and LAU
Huei‐ling Lai · Concentric Studies in Linguistics · 2004
With regard to the syntactic coding exhibited by the BUN construction and the LAU construction in Hakka, this study claims that their different syntactic grounding reflects their different conceptual reification. The issues are investigated from three aspects-semantic constraints, co-occurrence restrictions, and word order variations. It is argued that the seemingly overlapping functions of the BUN construction and the LAU construction differ in their attributed semantic constraints. Such constraints in turn govern the co-occurrence restrictions associated with the two constructions. It is also proposed that the syntactic configurations correlate with the relative prominence of the event participants pragmatically and cognitively.