Common Chinese and Early Chinese Morphology‪.‬

1. INTRODUCTION THIS PAPER CONSIDERS some modern dialect data that is relevant to the question of morphology in early Chinese. (1) Morphology consists of the principles governing word formation, especially the processes of inflection (regular changes a word undergoes) and derivation (affixation). The distinction between inflection and derivation originates with Marcus Terrentius Varro (116-27 8.C.E.), who called them "natural declension" and "voluntary declension" (Taylor 1995). That distinction may, however, be somewhat artificial in languages not of Greco-Roman origin. While these processes, especially inflection, are not usually considered present in Chinese on any large scale, a number of morphological functions have been posited for early Chinese and incorporated into reconstructions. Serious work was pioneered by French-trained sinologists, above all Henri Maspero (1883-1945). An early attempt, and the one perhaps best known to the greater linguistic world, is the ablaut case-system that Bernhard Karlgren proposed for early Chinese personal pronouns (1920), although that hypothesis was decisively demolished on philological grounds by George Kennedy (1956). Laurent Sagart's innovative Roots of Old Chinese (1999) is a recent effort to assemble evidence for the larger question of early morphology, and I shall examine here the two of Sagart's proposals that I consider the best supported.