Anti-causality and Anti-comitativity in Old Chinese: The Case of Zi

This short/ongoing study tackles the issue of anti-causality and anti-comitativity (Tsai 2007) expressed by zi '自 ' in Archaic and Middle Chinese. It will be shown that in the Archaic period, 自 is able to serve either as a VP-adverbial, denoting the anti-comitativity property, or a Mod(al)P-adverbial, conveying the anti-causality meaning. This distinction can not be recognized in the syntax, however, since 自 in general is attached to the left of verbs, no matter which semantic type it belongs to. The syntax-semantics correspondences are thus not clear at the stage. In Middle Chinese, things are different. Modal auxiliaries (可, 欲, 願, 敢, 能, 當), adverbs of quantification (嘗, 常), and negations (非, 不, 未) are allowed to intervene between 自 and the verb, as shown in (1-3). The causality/comitativity difference of 自 is therefore manifested by the overt syntax, where premodal 自 reflects anti-causality, and postmodal 自 mirrors comitativity, paralleling with adverbial 自 己 in Mandarin ( 蔡 2002). On the other hand, 自 in Middle Chinese bears greater ability to express the syntactically highest, semantically causation-oriented anti-causality than the 自 does in Archaic Chinese, in which such construal is by no means productive