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Towards a Typology of Participles

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Towards a Typology of Participles Department of Modern Languages University of Helsinki Towards a typology of participles Ksenia Shagal ACADEMIC DISSERTATION To be publicly discussed, by due permission of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki in auditorium XII (Main Building), on the 1st of April, 2017 at 10 o’clock. Helsinki 2017 ISBN 978-951-51-2957-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-951-51-2958-1 (PDF) Printed by Unigrafia Helsinki 2017 Abstract The dissertation is a typological study of participles based on the concept of participle specifically designed for cross-linguistic comparison. In a few words, participles are defined as non-finite verb forms that can be employed for adnominal modification, e.g. the form written in the book [written by my supervisor]. The study is based on the data from more than 100 genetically and geographically diverse languages possessing the relevant forms. The data for the research comes mainly from descriptive grammars, but first-hand materials from native speakers, including those collected in several field trips, are also of utmost importance. The main theoretical aim of the dissertation is to describe the diversity of verb forms and clausal structures involved in participial relativization in the world’s languages, as well as to examine the paradigms formed by participial forms. In different chapters of the dissertation, participles are examined with respect to several parameters, such as participial orientation, expression of temporal, aspectual and modal meanings, possibility of verbal and/or nominal agreement, encoding of arguments, and some others. Finally, all the parameters are considered together in the survey of participial systems. The findings reported in the dissertation are representative of a significant diversity in the morphology of participles, their syntactic behaviour and the oppositions they form in the system of the language. However, despite their versatility and multifunctionality, participles clearly exhibit enough idiosyncratic properties to be recognized as a cross- linguistically relevant category and studied in their own right. i Acknowledgements There is much more behind every doctoral thesis than just its author, and I am happy to acknowledge the contribution of all those who have been involved in any possible way in the completion of mine. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Seppo Kittilä for making my work in Helsinki possible in the first place. It is my great luck that we met in Lyon back in 2010. Many thanks for all the thought-provoking questions, comments and suggestions, and for the amazing ability to cheer me up no matter what. I am extremely grateful to Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm and Sonia Cristofaro for agreeing to be the preliminary examiners of my thesis. This really means a lot to me. The encouraging reviews and the ideas for improvement that I received made the final stages of my work smooth and enjoyable. I am also indebted to Peter Arkadiev for his careful reading of the dissertation and plenty of valuable comments on its various aspects. I would like to thank many wonderful people who assisted me in one way or another in obtaining data on individual languages. My sincerest gratitude to Aleksandr Yuryevich Rusakov and Maksim Makartsev (Albanian), James Andrew Cowell (Arapaho), Swintha Danielsen (Baure), David Erschler (Burushaski and Georgian), Paula Hämeen-Anttila and Jani Korhonen (Greek), Jane D’Altuin (Irish), Francesca Di Garbo (Italian), Jeongdo Kim (Korean), Valentin Vydrin (Mande), Ruth Kramer (Middle Egyptian), Aleksandr Letuchiy and Anton Somin (Modern Standard Arabic), Ekaterina Gruzdeva (Nivkh), Brigitte Pakendorf (Sakha), Nina Sumbatova (Tanti Dargwa), Chingduang Yurayong (Thai), Lesha Kozlov (Tundra Nenets), Don Killian (Uduk), Tatiana Nikitina (Wan), Hein van der Voort (West Greenlandic), Erika Sandman (Wutun). I am also grateful to all the speakers of Kalmyk, Nanai, Nivkh, Uilta and Erzya who worked with me on different occasions and provided me with invaluable data on participles in their languages. Typological studies like this one would not be possible without descriptive studies, and I wish to express my gratitude and admiration to all authors of descriptive grammars. In particular, I would like to thank all the authors and editors of the Routledge Descriptive Grammar series for including chapter 1.1.2.3.9 on non-finite relative clauses into their publications. I am also grateful to Don Killian for sharing his collection of descriptive grammars in the electronic form, which made data collection a lot easier than it could have been. I would like to thank all those representing my linguistic roots back in Saint Petersburg, where I started my way as a linguist. I wish to extend my heartfelt gratitude to Serezha Say and my dearest giggling girls, Masha Konoshenko, Sonya Oskolskaya, Masha Ovsyannikova and Sasha Vydrina, as well as Natasha Perkova who joined us later. I am thankful to Viktor Samuilovich Khrakovskiy, the supervisor of my BA and MA theses, and to all the lecturers at the Department of General Linguistics at the Saint Petersburg State University and researchers at the Department of Linguistic Typology at the Institute for Linguistic Studies. My special thanks are due to Stanislav Gurevich for all the work related to various linguistic olympiads in which we have been involved together since my high school years. ii My work on this study would not have been possible without the financial support from the Doctoral Programme Langnet which granted me a full-time PhD student position and provided with travel grants for several international conferences. In addition to that, Langnet has organized many seminars and other beneficial networking events, and I am grateful to all the researchers and students involved in the community for their inspiring talks and interesting discussions. Doctoral School in Humanities and Social Sciences also funded some of my conference trips, which were great opportunities to receive valuable feedback on my research. The Department of Modern Languages at the University of Helsinki has been a great place to work and study throughout these years. I am thankful to all my colleagues belonging to the subject of General Linguistics, and especially to Matti Miestamo as its head. I am grateful to the students who took my courses on finiteness, relative clauses and subordination and whose enthusiasm made me learn a lot about my research topic. I would also like to thank all those behind the HALS (Helsinki Area & Language Studies) initiative, in particular Riho Grünthal, Ekaterina Gruzdeva, Juha Janhunen and Jouko Lindstedt, for giving me a chance to take part in three amazing field trips which broadened my horizon as a researcher and were a fantastic experience otherwise. I am grateful to all the wonderful fellow students and young doctors who have surrounded me in Metsätalo, especially to Heini Arjava, Francesca Di Garbo, Lotta Jalava, Erika Sandman, Olli Silvennoinen and Vitalik Volk. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Kone Foundation who brought a lot of joy into the final year of my work on the thesis. Many thanks to all my non-linguistic friends in Helsinki, Saint Petersburg and around the globe for helping me to keep my mind off work when it was truly vital. I am sorry for all the no’s I had to say to countless amazing activities during the most intensive phases of dissertation writing, and I promise we will catch up when this is over. I am eternally grateful to my parents, my Mum, whose unconditional support has always been an endless source of peace and harmony, and my Dad, the memory of whom is one of the main things pushing me forward in my work and my life. Finally, I would like to thank my husband Eduard for the book cover, maps and tables, for weekend breakfasts and late night walks, for listening to me, for always believing in me, for making me laugh, and for everything else. iii Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................. i Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. ii List of abbreviations.......................................................................................................... viii Morphological glosses................................................................................................... viii Other abbreviations and special characters ................................................................... xiii 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Introducing participles............................................................................................... 1 1.2. Goals of the study...................................................................................................... 3 1.3. Approach ...................................................................................................................5 1.4. Sample, data, and methods........................................................................................ 6 1.5. Organization of the study ........................................................................................ 10 2. Defining participles ........................................................................................................ 12 2.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................
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