英文摘要 |
The verbs meaning 'to acquire' are known to be highly polyfunctional words in Southeast Asian languages. They have many syntactic functions and many grammatical meanings. One of the important grammatical meanings expressed by the verbs meaning 'to acquire' across languages is modality. This study aims to investigate the grammaticalization of the verb 'to acquire' in Vietnamese, namely, đưoc, into a grammatical marker of many types of modality. It is found that đưoc can indicate three types of modality, i.e. ability/capacity modality, circumstantial possibility, and permission. It has not developed into a fullfledged epistemic modal yet. It is argued that the grammaticalization of douc into different types of modality is primarily driven by metonymic processes. |