摘要
This paper investigates semantic extensions of the two most significant polysemous function words in Hakka. bun and lau. Though totally unrelated in their original senses, together they came to express the beneficiary role and exhibit a division of labor. Like many other languages, Hakka distinguishes among three kinds of beneficiaries, i.e. recipient beneficiaries, deputative beneficiaries, and plain beneficiaries. Bun is used primarily to express recipient beneficiaries and plain beneficiaries, whereas lau is used primarily to express deputative beneficiaries and plain beneficiaries. Within appropriate contexts, lau can also express recipient beneficiaries. However, bun can never express deputative beneficiaries due to the bi-event structure of the purposive bun constructions in Hakka. The semantic extension of bun is from recipient to recipient beneficiary, and then to plain beneficiary. The semantic extension of lau is from comitative to deputative beneficiary, and then to plain beneficiary. The semantic extensions are justified by invited inferencing (Traugott 1999. Traugott & Dasher 2002) in each stage in the process.