DOCSLIB.ORG

The Expression of Modality in Logoori

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Expression of Modality in Logoori JALL 2020; 41(2): 195–238 John Gluckman* and Margit Bowler* The expression of modality in Logoori https://doi.org/10.1515/jall-2020-2010 Abstract: This study presents a theoretically informed description of the expres- sion of modality in Logoori (Luyia; Bantu). We document verbal and non-verbal modal expressions in Logoori, and show how these expressions fit into proposed typologies of modal systems (Kratzer, Angelika. 1981. The notional category of modality. In Hans-Jurgen Eikmeyer & Hannes Rieser (eds.), Words, worlds, and contexts: New approaches in word semantics,38–74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, Kratzer, Angelika. 1991. Modality. In Armin von Stechow & Dieter Wunderlich (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of contemporary research, 639–650. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter; van der Auwera, Johan & Vladimir Plungian. 1998. Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2. 79–124. https://doi.org/10.1515/ lity.1998.2.1.79; Nauze, Fabrice. 2008. Modality in typological perspective. Amsterdam: Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation PhD thesis). We show that Logoori’s modal system raises some interesting questions regarding the typology and theoretical analysis of modality and its relationship to other kinds of meaning. Our study contributes to the nascent but growing research on modal systems cross linguistically by adding data from an understudied Bantu language. Keywords: Logoori, modality, Bantu, typology Abstract in Loogori: Kuloma sia linyalika na lidemadema, kya kulanganga “imiima” (“modality”), gavoleka mu Lulogooli. Lulogooli ni lulimi lwa ihiri ya avaluhya, na lumolomwa mu vivala vya imugwi wa Afrika. Ulusuma ilu lunduta kutula ku zisaabu na lilekanya lya uvuhandiki na uvwimiridzu vwa imiima. Kulangama sia livugirirana lya tsingulu (“force”) na lifunya (“flavor”) kutula ku Kratzer, Angelika. 1981. The notional category of modality. In Hans-Jurgen Eik- meyer & Hannes Rieser (eds.), Words, worlds, and contexts: New approaches in word semantics,38–74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, Kratzer, Angelika. 1991. Modality. In Armin von Stechow & Dieter Wunderlich (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of contemporary research, 639–650. Berlin: Mouton de *Corresponding authors: John Gluckman, Linguistics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA, E-mail: [email protected]; and Margit Bowler, Linguistics and English Language, University of Manchester, Manchester, USA, E-mail: [email protected] Open Access. © 2021 John Gluckman and Margit Bowler, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 196 J. Gluckman and M. Bowler Gruyter limannywa mu Lulogooli, na kuviika imiima djia Lulogooli mu vugeri vwa imiima djia tsinyimi tsya lilova. Misingi minene djia likaladasi yili ni: (a) Aman- g’ana gamannya imiima djia amakuva ga Lulogooli gamannya mativuli manyingi. Mala gaveye na luvera na imiima na khandi si gaveye navwo dave. Yagandi gavuula he, ni mativuli galiha gavoyong’ana na imiima gya amang’ana (henza Bowler na Gluckman. To appear. Gradability across grammatical domains. Lin- guistic Variation); na (b) imiima mu Lulogooli gyavukanya mugati mwa imiima msi mwa umundu (“participant-internal”) na imiima ikyova wa mundu (“participant- external”) sia Nauze, Fabrice. 2008. Modality in typological perspective. Amster- dam: Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation PhD thesis na Auwera, Johan & Vladimir Plungian. 1998. Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2. 79–124. https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.1998.2.1.79 vaahandika. Mu goosi ndio, likaladasi lyetu limeda ku igasi ineneha imannya imiima mu tsinyimi tsya Avaafrika (Kawalya, Deo, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, & Koen Bostoen. 2019. A corpus-driven study of the expression of necessity in Luganda (Bantu JE15). Southern African Linguistics and Language Studies 37. 361–381). 1 Introduction This article provides a theoretically informed description of modality in Logoori (Bantu, JE 41, rag), a Luyia language spoken in East Africa, primarily in Kenya.1 Logoori is also known as Maragoli, Llogoori, Logooli, and Luragooli, among other names. Conceptually speaking, modals are used to talk about what is possible or necessary, rather than what is real. We show examples of some basic modal expressions in English in (1); the relevant modal elements are underlined. (1) a. Mary might be at home. b. Mary must be at home. Cross-linguistic research has revealed a great deal of variation in how modal categories are grammaticalized (Bybee et al. 1994; Deal 2011; Matthewson et al. 2007; Nauze 2008; Vander Klok 2013; van der Auwera and Plungian 1998, among others). However, from a typological standpoint, the modal systems of African languages are relatively under-described. This article therefore works towards addressing this descriptive gap, and contributes to our overall body of typological literature on modality. 1 It is spoken by approximately 620,000 people in western Kenya (Kakamega district) and Tanzania (Simons and Fennig 2018). Modality in Logoori 197 The Logoori modal system is of linguistic interest for several reasons. First, Logoori verbal modals have a synchronic “double life” as both modal and lexical (i.e., main, non-modal) verbs. Second, Logoori displays what we believe is a previously undescribed connection between the expression of strong necessity modality and scalar (including spatial) thresholds (discussed in Section 4.5). Third, the Logoori modal system is of typological interest in that it makes some categorial distinctions that are not commonly grammaticized in other languages, namely, the distinction between “participant-internal” and “participant-external” modality (Nauze 2008; van der Auwera and Plungian 1998; discussed in Section 2.2). We otherwise find confirmation of some previously observed cross-linguistically robust patterns e.g., Logoori modals are fixed for Kratzerian force, but vary in flavor.2 Our primary focus is on the Logoori verbal modals, though we will also briefly discuss some non-verbal modal markers. We primarily aim for descriptive ade- quacy. While our goal is theoretically informed description, we will not attempt to formalize any of the notions discussed below. That said, it is not possible to talk about modal categories without presupposing some basic theoretical concepts. We therefore begin by summarizing previous literature on formal and typological approaches to modality in Section 2. This will frame our own discussion of the Logoori data. We discuss our fieldwork methodology and data presentation in Section 2.4, and provide our data in Sections 3, 4, and 5 on possibility, strong necessity, and weak necessity modality, respectively. In Section 6, we conclude and discuss our findings. 2 Existing categorizations of modal systems In this section, we briefly review two proposed categorizations of modal systems. We discuss Kratzer’s (1981, 1991) highly influential theory of modality in Section 2.1. Kratzer distinguishes between modal “force” and “flavor,” which we show in Sections 3, 4, and 5 are relevant distinctions in Logoori. In Section 2.2, we discuss van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) and Nauze (2008)’s proposed modal typol- ogies, focusing particularly on their distinction between “participant-internal” and “participant-external” modality. In our presentation of the Logoori data, we show that this distinction is relevant in capturing some morphosyntactic facts about the Logoori modals. We present our Logoori modal data in Sections 3, 4, and 5 roughly according to the modal classification proposed by Nauze (2008) (following van der Auwera and Plungian 1998). In Section 2.4, we discuss how we collected the data in this paper. 2 This appears to be consistent across the Luyia languages, as reported in Gluckman et al. (2017). 198 J. Gluckman and M. Bowler 2.1 Kratzerian modal force and flavor Conceptually speaking, the English modal elements might and must in (2) differ with respect to the “strength” of the speaker’s belief in the proposition “Mary is at home right now.” (Hence-forth, we will refer to the proposition embedded under a modal as the scope proposition.) (2) a. It’s the weekend. Sometimes Mary stays at home on the weekend, sometimes she goes to the park or the farmer’s market, so … Mary might be at home right now. b. Mary always drives her car to and from work. It’s 7pm on a work day, and I see that her car is parked in front of her house, so … Mary must be at home right now. Might in (2a) conveys that the speaker believes that it is a possibility that Mary is at home. Must in (2b) conveys that for all the speaker knows (based on e.g. her perception of Mary’s car in front of her house), the speaker is certain that Mary is at home (i.e., the speaker believes it is necessarily true that Mary is at home). Kratzer (1981, 1991) describes might and must as differing in modal force. In the broadest strokes, Kratzer distinguishes between what she calls “existential force” modals like might and “universal force” modals like must.3 In addition to encoding a distinction in force, modals can also encode a distinction in what Kratzer terms modal flavor. This describes the kind of facts that speakers use to evaluate a modal. Given the contexts provided in (2), might and must convey that the speaker is using their knowledge of the world to reason about 3 For readers of this paper, it is important to understand the conceptual distinctions between different modal forces, but understanding the theoretical distinction is not necessary; nonetheless, we provide a basic formal description and semantics for existential might and universal must in (i). Kratzerian theories of modality treat modals as denoting quantifiers over possible worlds; the terms “existential” and “universal” refer to the respective kinds of quantifiers. The denotation for existential force might in (ia) contains the existential quantifier ∃, whereas the denotation for universal force must in (ib) contains the universal quantifier ∀. These quantifiers operate over the set of worlds picked out by a contextually determined function, f(w), that determines the modal flavor. This set of worlds is called the “modal base.” (i) a.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • SCLA Book of Abstracts
    Aleksandrs Berdicevskis & Alexander Piperski WHAT DO WE REGULARIZE AND WHAT IS REGULAR: RUSSIAN VERBS THROUGH THE CENTURIES One of the most notable and widespread long-term processes in language change is the regularization of morphological forms. It has been studied from various aspects, and questions that have been addressed include, for instance, who is most likely to eliminate irregularities, children or adults (Hudson Kam & Newport 2009), when irregularities are most likely to be eliminated, in what social circumstances (Berdichevskij 2012), which irregularities are most likely to be eliminated (Lieberman et al 2007, Carroll et al. 2012). In this paper, we deal with the latter question. We also show, however, that in order to get a reliable answer a more fundamental question has to be addressed first: What is regular for the speakers’ minds? The answer is not always obvious. In a well-known study where a neat correlation between the rate of regularization of irregular English verbs and the frequency of word usage was found, Lieberman et al. (2007) classify the -ed verbs as regular and all other verbs as irregular, which seems a logical thing to do. Studying the same process in German strong verbs, Carroll et al. (2012) also use a binary opposition, noting though that for German this decision presents certain problems. We perform a similar study on Russian verbs, which cannot be divided into two classes (“regular” and “irregular”). Of the 16 basic inflectional classes (Zaliznjak 1977), 5 are sometimes labelled “regular” and 11 “irregular”, but they are in fact irregular to a different extent. Since binary notation is not an option, an understanding of what regularity actually is and how it should be operationalized is required.
    [Show full text]
  • Determining Morphosyntactic Feature Values: the Case of Case1 Greville G
    To appear in: Greville G. Corbett and Michael Noonan (eds) Case and grammatical relations: papers in honour of Bernard Comrie. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Determining morphosyntactic feature values: the case of case1 Greville G. Corbett Surrey Morphology Group A long-running and still vital debate concerns the way in which we can determine the number of cases (case values) in a given language. This matters both for the description of particular languages, and even more for typology, given the imperative for the typologist to compare like with like. Within this debate special attention has been devoted to Russian. And rightly so, since Russian exhibits a whole set of difficult analytic problems with respect to case. As a result it has been claimed to have as few as six case values or as many as eleven. This contribution continues the debate, again giving Russian a central place. Our concern with case is partly with case as a feature (comparable to gender, number and person), but mainly with the values of the feature (nominative, accusative and so on).2 What is novel about it is first the adoption of a canonical approach, in which we construct a logical scheme against which to evaluate the different case values (see §1 below), and second the fact that the criteria we discuss are shown to be relevant to morphosyntactic features more generally, rather then being restricted to case. The debate on case has a distinguished earlier history, including among others Hjelmslev (1935-37), Jakobson (1936, 1958),3 de Groot (1939) and Kuryłowicz 1 This is an issue to which Bernard Comrie has made important contributions (1986, 1991).
    [Show full text]
  • Department of Modern Languages UPPSALA UNIVERSITY
    SLOVO Journal of Slavic Languages, Literatures and Cultures Volume 59, 2018 Department of Modern Languages UPPSALA UNIVERSITY Slovo Journal of Slavic Languages, Literatures and Cultures No. 59, 2018 Editors: Mattias Ågren, Julie Hansen, Jussi Nuorluoto, Jelena Spasenić Department of Modern Languages UPPSALA UNIVERSITET Department of Modern Languages Slovo. Journal of Slavic Languages, Literatures and Cultures No. 59, 2018 Front cover: Uppsala University Library Carolina Rediviva with marching students in the foreground. Johan Way, 1842 (UUB). ISSN: 2001–7395 CONTENTS ”RURIKS STAMTRÄD” – EN AV DE RYSKA SKATTERNA PÅ CAROLINA REDIVIVA 7 OLENA JANSSON, INGRID MAIER ЛЕКСИЧЕСКИЕ СРЕДСТВА ЭКСПРЕССИВНОГО И ЭМОЦИОНАЛЬНОГО ВОЗДЕЙСТВИЯ В ПОВЕСТИ АСТРИД ЛИНДГРЕН «ЭМИЛЬ ИЗ ЛЁННЕБЕРГИ» И ЕЁ ПЕРЕВОДАХ НА РУССКИЙ ЯЗЫК 40 ELENA KAPUSTINA, MARTINA BJÖRKLUND WHEN A SINGLE WORD IS ENOUGH: NORWEGIAN COMPOUNDS AND THEIR RUSSIAN COUNTERPARTS 61 TORE NESSET I MÖRKRETS SKUGGA… OM EDITH SÖDERGRANS OCH HALINA POŚWIATOWSKAS POETISKA VÄRLDAR 73 MAŁGORZATA ANNA PACKALÉN PARKMAN REVIEW. ANDREA GULLOTTA. INTELLECTUAL LIFE AND LITERATURE AT SOLOVKI 1923-1930: THE PARIS OF THE NORTHERN CONCENTRATION CAMPS. CAMBRIDGE: LEGENDA 2018. X + 370 PP. 93 IRINA KARLSOHN NEWS FROM UPPSALA 95 OLENA JANSSON IN MEMORIAM: PROFESSOR ANDREI ZALIZNIAK 99 KARINE ÅKERMAN SARKISIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 2017 102 JOHAN MUSKALA Slovo. Journal of Slavic Languages, Literatures and Cultures ISSN 2001–7395 No. 59, 2018, pp. 7–39 ”Ruriks stamträd” – en av de ryska skatterna på Carolina Rediviva1 Olena Jansson och Ingrid Maier Institutionen för moderna språk, Uppsala universitet [email protected] [email protected] Abstract. “Rurik’s genealogical tree” – one of the Russian treasures at Carolina Rediviva Among the treasures in the university library in Uppsala (Sweden) is an extraordinary genealogical tree of Russia’s Rurikid rulers, beginning with the legendary Rurik and ending with Tsar Fedor Ivanovič, who died in 1598.
    [Show full text]
  • Semantic Differences in Translation Exploring the Field of Inchoativity
    Semantic differences in translation Exploring the field of inchoativity Lore Vandevoorde language Translation and Multilingual Natural science press Language Processing 13 Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing Editors: Oliver Czulo (Universität Leipzig), Silvia Hansen-Schirra (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), Reinhard Rapp (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) In this series: 1. Fantinuoli, Claudio & Federico Zanettin (eds.). New directions in corpus-based translation studies. 2. Hansen-Schirra, Silvia & Sambor Grucza (eds.). Eyetracking and Applied Linguistics. 3. Neumann, Stella, Oliver Čulo & Silvia Hansen-Schirra (eds.). Annotation, exploitation and evaluation of parallel corpora: TC3 I. 4. Czulo, Oliver & Silvia Hansen-Schirra (eds.). Crossroads between Contrastive Linguistics, Translation Studies and Machine Translation: TC3 II. 5. Rehm, Georg, Felix Sasaki, Daniel Stein & Andreas Witt (eds.). Language technologies for a multilingual Europe: TC3 III. 6. Menzel, Katrin, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski & Kerstin Anna Kunz (eds.). New perspectives on cohesion and coherence: Implications for translation. 7. Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Oliver Czulo & Sascha Hofmann (eds). Empirical modelling of translation and interpreting. 8. Svoboda, Tomáš, Łucja Biel & Krzysztof Łoboda (eds.). Quality aspects in institutional translation. 9. Fox, Wendy. Can integrated titles improve the viewing experience? Investigating the impact of subtitling on the reception and enjoyment of film using eye tracking and questionnaire data. 10. Moran, Steven & Michael Cysouw. The Unicode cookbook for linguists: Managing writing systems using orthography profiles. 11. Fantinuoli, Claudio (ed.). Interpreting and technology. 12. Nitzke, Jean. Problem solving activities in post-editing and translation from scratch: A multi-method study. 13. Vandevoorde, Lore. Semantic differences in translation. ISSN: 2364-8899 Semantic differences in translation Exploring the field of inchoativity Lore Vandevoorde language science press Vandevoorde, Lore.
    [Show full text]
  • Martin Haspelmath, List of Publications
    Martin Haspelmath - List of publications To appear 2010: [Andrej L. Malchukov, Martin Haspelmath & Bernard Comrie] 2010. Studies in Ditransitive Constructions: A Comparative Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. "The Behaviour-before-Coding Principle in syntactic change." To appear in: Floricic, Franck (ed.) Mélanges Denis Creissels. Paris: Presses de L'École Normale Supérieure. [Uri Tadmor, Martin Haspelmath & Bradley Taylor] "Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary." Diachronica 2010 "Framework-free grammatical theory." In: Heine, Bernd & Narrog, Heiko (eds.) The Oxford handbook of grammatical analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 341-365. 2009 [Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor] (eds.) 2009. Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1081 pp. [Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor] (eds.) 2009. World Loanword Database. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library. Online resource, <http://wold.livingsources.org/> [Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor]. 2009. "The Loanword Typology project and the World Loanword Database." In: [Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor] (eds.) 2009. Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1-34. "Lexical borrowing: Concepts and issues." In: Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds.) 2009. Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 35-54. "Terminology of case." In: Malchukov, Andrej & Spencer, Andrew (eds.) 2009. The Oxford handbook of case. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 505-517. "An empirical test of the Agglutination Hypothesis." Scalise, Sergio & Magni, Elisabetta & Bisetto, Antonietta (eds.) 2009. Universals of language today. (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 76.) Dordrecht: Springer, 13-29. "The typological database of the World Atlas of Language Structures." In: Everaert, Martin & Musgrave, Simon (eds.) 2009.
    [Show full text]
  • Participle-Converbs in Iron Ossetic: Syntactic and Semantic Properties1
    Participle-Converbs in Iron Ossetic: 1 Syntactic and Semantic Properties Oleg Belyaev, Arseniy Vydrin This paper concerns the use of forms in -gɐ and -gɐjɐ in contemporary Ossetic. Our aim is to produce a typologically informed and fine-grained account of both the syntax and semantics of these two formatives. As we will show, the main difference is that while the form in -gɐ is a participle-converb (with a wide range of uses), the form in -gɐjɐ is a converb proper. At the same time, there are a number of surprising syntactic effects and subtle semantic differences. We will provide a general description of the uses of the two forms and of some of the typologically interesting facts associated with them, and an explanation of the facts observed. 1. Introduction The two deverbal Ossetic2 forms under discussion are derived from the present stem via the affixes -gɐ and -gɐjɐ (formally the ablative of -gɐ), e.g. kɐn-ən "to do" → kɐn-gɐ(jɐ) žɐʁ-ən "to say" → žɐʁ-gɐ(jɐ) According to the main reference grammars (ABAEV 1970, AXVLEDIANI 1963, BAGAEV 1965), the form in -gɐ can be used both as a participle (1) and as a converb (2), while the form in -gɐjɐ can only be used as a converb (2). Word order in Ossetic NPs is fairly rigid, and attributes must always be preposed to the noun they modify. Therefore, the form in -gɐ(jɐ) in (2) is unambiguously converbal. (1) wəsə lɐppu-jə ɐldar xɐd-tul-gɐ(*-jɐ) wɐrdon-ə š-bad-ən kod-t-a that boy-GEN landlord self-roll-PART-ABL cart-IN PV-sit-INF do-TR-PST.3SG 3 "the landlord made that boy sit on a "self-going"cart"(ABAEV 1970: 612) (2) lɐppu kɐw-gɐ(-jɐ) ba-səd jɐ=xɐzar-mɐ boy cry-PART(-ABL) PV-go.PST.3SG POSS.3SG=house-ALL 4 "the boy, crying, came to his house" 1 The research was carried out with the financial support of RGNF, grant No.
    [Show full text]
  • Towards a Corpus-Based Grammar of Upper Lozva Mansi: Diachrony and Variation
    Introduction Upper Lozva Mansi Our Documentation Grammar writing Conclusion Towards a corpus-based grammar of Upper Lozva Mansi: diachrony and variation Daria Zhornik, Sophie Pokrovskaya, Vladimir Plungian Lomonosov Moscow State University Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Descriptive Grammars and Typology, Helsinki, 29.03.2019 . Daria Zhornik, Sophie Pokrovskaya, Vladimir Plungian MSU, ILing RAS Upper Lozva Mansi: diachrony and variation Introduction Upper Lozva Mansi Our Documentation Grammar writing Conclusion Overview Introduction Upper Lozva Mansi Our Documentation Grammar writing Conclusion . Daria Zhornik, Sophie Pokrovskaya, Vladimir Plungian MSU, ILing RAS Upper Lozva Mansi: diachrony and variation Introduction Upper Lozva Mansi Our Documentation Grammar writing Conclusion Some background I Mansi < Ob-Ugric < Uralic, EGIDS status: threatened; I Russia, 940 speakers (2010 census) in Western Siberia. Daria Zhornik, Sophie Pokrovskaya, Vladimir Plungian MSU, ILing RAS Upper Lozva Mansi: diachrony and variation Introduction Upper Lozva Mansi Our Documentation Grammar writing Conclusion The Mansi language I Earlier: 4 Mansi dialect branches I Today: only the Northern group survives I Most Northern Mansi speakers: disperse distribution in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug I Speakers mostly live in Russian villages/towns: I forced shift to Russian; I almost no opportunities for using Mansi; I all education is in Russian I In turns out that much
    [Show full text]
  • Notes on Eastern Armenian Verbal Paradigms
    Vladimir Plungian Notes on Eastern Armenian verbal paradigms “Temporal mobility” and perfective stems Abstract: The paper discusses two “hidden” semantic oppositions in the Arme- nian verbal system: both have no specific segmental markers but are manifested in the division of verbal forms into certain formal classes. In the first case, we deal with the the division into synthetic and periphrastic forms, which corresponds to the expression of the so-called "temporal mobility" (or the ability to express the opposition between present and past). In the second case, it is the morphological opposition between the basic verbal stem and the stem with an alternation. The choice of the alternating stem is related to the perfective semantics of the verbal form, so that one can speak of a general aspectual opposition of perfective and imperfective sets of forms in Armenian (not isolated in traditional analysis). Keywords: Armenian, verbal inflection, tense, aspect Introduction The main focus of the present paper will be certain formal properties of verbal paradigms in Armenian, first of all those which may have special cross-linguistic relevance. To the best of our knowledge, these properties have not been dis- cussed in the specialized literature at any length (if at all). The main bulk of our material comes from the standard written language of the Republic of Armenia, i.e., Average East Armenian (cf. Vaux 1998). Hereafter, we will refer to it simply as “Armenian”, unless otherwise stated. Similar properties of other idioms of Modern Armenian (both Eastern and Western dialects) deserve a separate and a more detailed discussion, which is far beyond the scope of the present study.
    [Show full text]
  • Peter M. Arkadiev
    PETER M. ARKADIEV CHAPTER 7 Differential Argument Marking in Two-term Case Systems and its Implications for the General Theory of Case Marking1 1. INTRODUCTION In this paper I present a view of case marking that explicitly rejects a commonly assumed position that its primary function is to merely distinguish arguments from one another (cf. Comrie 1978, 1989; Dixon 1979, 1994), while marking them according to their specific semantic or pragmatic functions is a secondary phenomenon. In order to show that such a view (which has already been challenged by many linguists, see section 2) is untenable, I will investigate data from argument- encoding variations in languages which possess only two cases, and will compare them with similar phenomena from languages with richer case systems. As it will be seen, ‘nondiscriminative’ coding strategies found in two-term case systems, though typologically unusual, can be easily accounted for under the assumption that case marking of a particular argument is subject to ‘local’ ‘indexing’ rules and constraints dealing rather with this particular argument, than with the overall ‘global’ relational structure of the clause. The ‘discriminatory’ function, though retaining its importance, is, in this view, no more than just one of the constraints relevant for argument marking, whose ranking with regards to other such constraints is not always and not necessarily high. Also, I am going to argue that, contrary to some recent Optimality-theoretic proposals (see e.g., Woolford 2001), the case inventory found in a particular language cannot be always derived from a universal set of constraints (see Wunderlich and Lakämper 2001 for a similar proposal).
    [Show full text]
  • Differential Argument Marking in Two-Term Case
    PETER M. ARKADIEV DIFFERENTIAL ARGUMENT MARKING IN TWO-TERM CASE SYSTEMS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE GENERAL 1 THEORY OF CASE MARKING INTRODUCTION In this paper I present a view of case marking that explicitly rejects a commonly assumed position that its primary function is to merely distinguish arguments from one another (cf. Comrie 1978, 1989; Dixon 1979, 1994; Kibrik 1979, 1997), while marking them according to their specific semantic or pragmatic functions is a secondary phenomenon. In order to show that such a view (which has already been challenged by many linguists, see section 1) is untenable, I will investigate data from argument-encoding variations in the languages which possess only two cases, and will compare them with similar phenomena from languages with richer case systems. As it will be seen, ‘nondiscriminative’ coding strategies found in two-term case systems, though typologically unusual, can be easily accounted for under the assumption that case marking of a particular argument is subject to ‘local’ ‘indexing’ rules and constraints dealing rather with this particular argument, than with the overall ‘global’ relational structure of the clause. ‘Discriminatory’ function, though retaining its importance, is, in this view, no more than just one of the constraints relevant for argument marking, whose ranking with regards to other such constraints in not always and not necessarily high. Also, I am going to argue that, contrary to some recent Optimality-theoretic proposals (see e.g. Woolford 2001), the case inventory found in a particular language cannot be always derived from a universal set of constraints (see Wunderlich & Lakämper 2001 for a similar proposal).
    [Show full text]
  • Grammaticalization of the Verb to Acquire Into Modality
    Taiwan Journal of Linguistics Vol. 13.2, 117-150, 2015 DOI: 10.6519/TJL.2015.13(2).4 GRAMMATICALIZATION OF THE VERB ‘TO ACQUIRE’ INTO MODALITY: A CASE STUDY IN VIETNAMESE* Kingkarn Thepkanjana and Soraj Ruangmanee Chulalongkorn University ABSTRACT 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, được, into a grammatical marker of many types of modality. It is found that được can indicate three types of modality, i.e. ability/capacity modality, circumstantial possibility, and permission. It has not developed into a full- fledged epistemic modal yet. It is argued that the grammaticalization of được into different types of modality is primarily driven by metonymic processes. Key words: grammaticalization, modality, verb ‘to acquire’, Vietnamese * We thank the two anonymous reviewers of this paper for valuable comments and suggestions. We also thank Professor Ly Toan Thang for providing various kinds of help with the Vietnamese data used in this study. This research work is supported by the Ratchadaphiseksomphot Endowment Fund of Chulalongkorn University (RES560530179-HS) granted to the first author and a postdoctoral scholarship of the Graduate School, Chulalongkorn University, granted to the second author. 117 Kingkarn Thepkanjana and Soraj Ruangmanee 1. INTRODUCTION It is widely known that the verbs meaning ‘to acquire’ are among the most polyfunctional words in Southeast Asian languages (van der Auwera; Kehayov and Vittrant 2007; Enfield 2003).
    [Show full text]
  • The Metaphoric Grounding of Grammar: the Modal Construction with Give in Brazilian Portuguese
    BLS 33, No 1 2007. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v33i1.3539 (published by the Berkeley Linguistics Society and the Linguistic Society of America) The metaphoric grounding of grammar: the modal construction with give in Brazilian Portuguese MARIA MARGARIDA M. SALOMAO UFJF/CAPES 1 The theoretical issue The hypothesis that grammar is metaphorically grounded is quite a new idea in the relatively short history of linguistics as a disciplinary field (or as an ordre du discours, in the terms of Foucault 1970). The largely prevailing view in the field has grammar either as the Saussurean “system” or as the Chomskyan “competence.” In any case, it is seen as a set of formal regularities to be found across (more or less) spontaneous speech, in distinctive opposition to the more anomalous figurative uses, characteristic of special communicative practices, like poetry, politics or philosophy. In the late nineties, the idea comes to be forcefully stated within the Neu- ral Theory of Language framework (Lakoff to appear, Lakoff 2006, Feld- man2006, Gallese and Lakoff 2005, Feldman and Narayanan 2004, Lakoff and Johnson 1999), which purports that the meaning of all abstract concepts, includ- ing grammatical meaning, is metaphorically mapped from the meaning of con- crete concepts. The concrete source domain meaning contributes its frame and image-schema structure to the target domain in point. The theory strongest claim is that concrete concepts are directly embodied in the brain in such a way that the same neural circuitries activated to carry out an action are also activated when that specific action-type is watched or imagined or remembered.
    [Show full text]