Kong2 as a verb for saying ‘on the move’ in Taiwanese Southern Min*

Abstract

This paper explores the grammaticalization that kong2 講 ‘say’ in Taiwanese Southern Min has undergone, as attested in examples extracted from a range of modern colloquial corpora. Starting with its use as a verb it has taken on multiple functions such as putative marker, complementizer, topic marker, parenthetical, and sentence-final particle as well as its grammaticalized function in various lexicalized collocates. Based on colloquial data I pin down the syntactic, semantic and in some cases discourse function of each type of construction featuring kong2 講. In particular, I focus on the intermediate stage of grammatical change in the bridging context in an attempt to find the motivation underscoring the change of kong2 講 as a lexical verb to a grammatical function word such as a parenthetical.