Vietnamese demonstratives: A spatially-based polysemy network

Abstract

For all human beings, a crucial function of language is to draw attention to things in the world. Like most languages, Vietnamese has its set of ‘pointing words’ that fulfil this function, including nay ‘this’, đây ‘this/here’ and đấy, đo, kia ‘that/there’, ấy ‘that’, and nọ ‘that’. Though the meaning of these seven words has expanded and changed over time, all of them originally served to orient the hearer’s attention to something proximal or distal to the speaker’s location. These words are termed demonstratives in English or chỉ định từ in Vietnamese. Chỉ định từ currently play a wide range of syntactic and semantic roles. They can occur as the determiner in a noun phrase (nha nay ‘this house’, nha ấy/kia/nọ ‘that house’) or appear on their own as either pronominals (đây/đấy, đo, kia la nha toi ‘this/that is my house’) or as locative adverbs (lại đây ‘come here’, đến đấy/đo/kia ‘go there’). In the appropriate syntactic environments, these terms allow the speaker to ‘point’ not only to specific objects but also to abstract, invisible concepts that are present, distant, remembered or imagined. Despite the wide range of uses of chỉ định từ, an exhaustive analysis of their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic functions has previously been lacking in Vietnamese. Even a cursory analysis of the seven Vietnamese demonstratives reveals that each has not just one meaning or sense, but rather a complex network of related senses, or polysemy network. For example, the demonstrative ấy has thirteen different senses, including the function of indicating the position of a referent in space (a spatial sense), preceding discourse (an anaphoric sense) or in the memory of the speaker and/or hearer (as in recognitional, presentational, place holder, or avoidance usages). In addition, ấy has extended senses indicating person deixis, discourse cohesion, modality and interjective usages. Unquestionably, the form ấy has a wide variety of uses in Vietnamese. Is it coincidence that these uses share the same form ấy? If that were the case, the uses of ấy would be unconnected homonymous meanings. Or are these uses somehow related? If so, then the uses of ấy are polysemous senses, and it should be possible to trace how each sense evolved from another, ultimately tracking the evolution of the polysemy network back to a single ancestral sense. This study analyses the form and function of chỉ định từ as found in a range of written texts, and finds that the various functions of Vietnamese demonstratives are related. The extensions responsible for the current range of demonstrative functions follow recognised paths of metaphoric and metonymic change, so that these changes can be reconstructed from synchronic data even in the absence of direct historical evidence. Although all of the seven demonstratives are argued to be polysemous as the result of semantic extensions, each demonstrative has followed its own path of change and no two demonstratives have identical polysemy networks. These differences are due both to the individual semantics of the different demonstratives, and to the stage of change that each demonstrative has reached. The demonstrative nọ may be the best illustration of this second factor, the stage of development of a demonstrative. The demonstrative nọ once had a spatial sense referring to a distant referent, which is argued to be its oldest and most basic sense. This spatial sense extended to a range of other senses, but over time, the spatial sense itself was lost. The demonstrative nọ is the only one in the system currently lacking any spatial function, though its later, extended senses remain. A logical explanation of the present-day senses of nọ can only be achieved through a reconstructed connection with its now-defunct basic meaning. The polysemy structures of chỉ định từ can only be fully understood via the reconstruction of their earlier senses and the extensions these senses underwent. Without the reconstructed spatial sense of nọ, for example, the demonstrative’s polysemy network looks like a scattered system of unrelated senses, rather than a tidy network of senses related by recognised regular semantic changes. The current study, then, is intended to contribute to the field of linguistics in two ways. First, the study provides an in-depth documentation and analysis of the Vietnamese demonstrative system, which has previously been lacking. This comprehensive documentation and analysis could be used as a resource for diachronic or further cross-linguistic study. Second, the semantic evolution and polysemy of demonstratives has previously received relatively little attention in any language. It is therefore hoped that this research will contribute more generally to the study of universal tendencies of grammaticalisation, language change, and the polysemy networks that can result.