What are the origins of the て-form? Was its meaning when it initially appeared
different from what it is now?
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2014-10-12T21:56:40.873
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2014-10-12T22:48:19.460
2014-10-12T22:48:19.460
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question
grammar
What is the etymology of the て-form?
The connective particle _-te_ is derived from the continuative form of the
lower bigrade perfective auxiliary _-tu_.

# Syntactic evolution

The distribution of the auxiliary _-tu_ (including its continuative form _-te_
) was that it appeared after the continuative form of verbs (i.e., it did
**not** appear after _-ku_ in adjectives), which is a restriction all
auxiliaries share.

At some point, _-te_ lost its explicit perfective function and became
reanalyzed as a connective particle, and at that point its distribution became
much more relaxed, allowing it to appear after anything which was in the
continuative form (i.e., including adjectives).

# Semantics

As to why the perfective auxiliary _-tu_ was what ended up evolving into the
connective particle instead of something else, I think it is a fairly natural
choice – the perfective semantics (i.e., that the verb has "completed") is
still present in a number of interpretations of _-te_ , in the sense that the
verb marked by _-te_ is completed either before or in parallel with the
following verb.
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2014-10-12T22:45:54.693
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2014-10-12T22:45:54.693
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answer