When the particle ti 底 appeared in Late Middle Chinese, around the 8th or 9th century, it was primarily used as the marker of nominal subor-dination in the middle of a nominal phrase, hence similar to the classical chih 之. It was also used as a nominalizer at the end of a nominal phrase, hence similar to the classical che 者. Because of the dual similarity, previous scholars have proposed that ti was derived from chih, or from che, or from both. The present paper agrues that ti was exclusively derived from chih and tries to account for the occurrence of ti in phrase-final position.
The phonological section (1) shows that chih split into a doublet because the literary form preserved the -j- medial whereas the colloquial
之 OC*tj□g>tj□i>tj□i>t□i>底 MC tei>ti
之 *tj□g>tj□i> 之 MC tsi>chih
(2) argues that all known instances of similar splits involve only the loss of -j-, never the development of -j- into -i-, and this fact supports Li Rong's view that IVth Division words, including ti, do not have medial -i- in MC, and (3) after examining the phonological patterns of interchange of characters in Tun-huang texts, due to merger, and Tibetan transcriptions of Late Middle Chinese, concludes that 者 tja>tsja>che could not develop into 底 tei>ti, nor could chih and che merge into a single form.
The sections on historical grammar propose two routes through which ti, derived from chih, must have developed into a nominalizer. (1) Middle Chinese has three nominal constructions in which chih may substitute for che: (A) 〔V O che〕+S, (B) 〔(S) V che〕+O, and (C) N che N. (A) came about because the Han dynasty witnessed a word-order change N+〔Num+M〕>〔Num+M〕+N, which triggered a similar word-order change S+〔V O che〕>〔V O che〕+S. (B) joined (A) when in Middle Chinese the agent/patient distinction was neutralized. After chih became ti, ti continued to interchange with che in (A), (B), and (C), and this interchange-ability eventually spread to the phrase-final position previously occupied by che. (2) In the 6th and 7th centuries, before the rise of ti as a particle, there emerged a new nominalizing construction VP chih che "the one who/which…", which remained current up to the 11th century. It was proposed that chih che became ti by assimilation and haplology:
之者 tj□i tja > tei ta > tei tei = 底底>底 ti
〔VP chih che〕 thus became 〔VP ti〕 "the one who/which…"
The replacement of 底 ti by 的 te first occurred in 1238, in a stele recording a royal license granted by the Mongol emperor to a Taoist temple.
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