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The loss of Jê nominal verbs in Panará
Abstract
In Jê languages, verbs appear in a non-finite form that fulfills a double function: licensing marked TAME semantics in main clauses, and licensing embedded clauses. However, the Panará language lost its non-finite verbal form. This paper examines Panará verbs from both a synchronic and diachronic angle, and in a broader comparative approach with regards to the morphosyntactic behaviour of verbs in the other Jê languages. The main claim is that the non-finite forms prevalent in the Jê family underwent a reanalysis in Panará, resulting in fully finite clauses in all environments.
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Resumo O Canela é a língua falada pelos povos Canela Apa?niekrá e Canela Ramkokamekrá (cerca de três mil indivíduos) que habitam duas terras indígenas (Área Indígena Porquinhos e Área Indígena Kanela, respectivamente), localizadas no estado do Maranhão. Neste artigo, distingo inicialmente os sintagmas posposicionais que são (semanticamente) argumentos e os que são adjuntos em Canela (família Jê, tronco Macro-Jê). A seguir, identifico os argumentos definidos como o paciente (P), o tema (T) e o recipiente (R), e apresento suas respectivas propriedades gramaticais (codificação, comportamento e controle). A conclusão é de que P e T são o objeto direto, enquanto R (de verbos como ‘dar’, ‘contar’ e ‘mostrar’), lexicalmente especificado, é o objeto indireto.
During several decades, syntactic reconstruction has been more or less regarded as a bootless and an unsuccessful venture, not least due to the heavy criticism in the 1970s from scholars like Watkins, Jeffers, Lightfoot, etc. This fallacious view culminated in Lightfoot’s (2002: 625) conclusion: “[i]f somebody thinks that they can reconstruct grammars more successfully and in more widespread fashion, let them tell us their methods and show us their results. Then we’ll eat the pudding.” This volume provides methods for the identification of i) cognates in syntax, and ii) the directionality of syntactic change, showcasing the results in the introduction and eight articles. These examples are offered as both tastier and also more nourishing than the pudding Lightfoot had in mind when discarding the viability of reconstructing syntax.
Based on the cross- and intra-linguistic distribution of Person Case Constraint (PCC) effects, this paper shows that there can be no agreement in 'ϕ'-features (PERSON, NUMBER, GENDER/NOUN-CLASS) which systematically lacks a morpho-phonological footprint. That is, there is no such thing as “abstract” 'ϕ'-agreement, null across the entire paradigm. Applying the same diagnostic to instances of clitic doubling, we see that these do involve syntactic agreement. This cannot be because clitic doubling is agreement; it behaves like movement (and unlike agreement) in a variety of respects. Nor can this be because clitic doubling, 'qua' movement, is contingent on prior agreement—since the claim that all movement depends on prior agreement is demonstrably false. Clitic doubling requires prior agreement because it is an instance of non-local head movement, and movement of X0 to Y0 always requires a prior syntactic relationship between Y0 and XP. In local head movement (the kind that is already permitted under the Head Movement Constraint), this requirement is trivially satisfied by (c-)selection. But in non-local cases, agreement must fill this role.
The central goal of this article is to argue that functional categories are universally associated with a core function but that their substantive content is subject to variation. We review evidence from Ritter and Wiltschko (2009) based on language variation: INFL may be associated with temporal, spatial, or participant marking. This paper explores the properties of the universal category INFL in clauses where it remains without substantive content. We show that languages pattern in similar ways in these contexts. That is, in the absence of variable substantive content, the universal formal properties of INFL emerge.
This paper capitalizes on the difference between person complementarity (e.g. PCC effects) and omnivorous number (e.g. the
fact that a single plural marker can be used to cross-reference more than one plural argument) by proposing that the same
syntactic mechanism of Multiple Agree is responsible for both. The widely divergent surface difference results from the fact
that person features are fully binary, whereas number features are syntactically privative. Additionally, arguments drawn
from a variety of verbal cross-referencing morphemes implicating phi-interactions between subject and object support the claim
that these elements are clitics, necessitating a principled morphosyntactic difference between clitics and other DPs undergoing
object shift, and revisitation of the clitic-affix distinction.
KeywordsMultiple agree–Omnivorous number–Person complementarity–Syntactic rebracketing–Clitic/affix distinction–Tense-invariance
In modeling the effects of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC), a common claim is that 3rd person “is not a person”. However, while this claim does work in the syntax, it creates problems in the morphology. For example, characterizing the well-known “spurious se effect” in Spanish simply cannot be done without reference to 3rd person. Inspired by alternatives to underspecification that have emerged in phonology (e.g., Calabrese, 1995), a revised featural system is proposed, whereby syntactic agreement may be relativized to certain values of a feature, in particular, the contrastive and marked values. The range of variation in PCC effects is shown to emerge as a consequence of the parametric options allowed on a Probing head, whereas the representation of person remains constant across modules of the grammar and across languages. Linguistics Version of Record
The purpose of this article is to provide an explanatory account of the divide between enclisis and proclisis in pronominal clitic constructions in Romance and Semitic languages. The analysis is based on two fundamental assumptions: (i) clitics do not target designated prelabelled positions, but take maximal advantage of the available categorial structure; (ii) cliticization patterns are tightly dependent on the inflectional properties of the language, more specifically, on the feature content of the two functional categories, Infl and v. We show that the various asymmetries in clitic behavior can elegantly be explained in terms of the minimalist theory of movement, combined with certain formal hypotheses about the building of phrase structure and about the relation of morphology to syntax. Relying on certain ideas about uninterpretable features, Attract and Agree, we argue that cliticization patterns can be made to follow from the strategies made available by U.G. to check the uninterpretable feature of the category Infl and from the derivational origin of the tense and person-number features. A principle, the Unselective Attract Principle, is introduced according to which an uninterpretable feature is a potential attractor for all the features which are of the same type as the one which it selectively attracts. In Romance and in Semitic, clitic phi-sets are unselectively attracted by Infl. Two additional principles, the Priority Principle and the Single Licensing Condition, insure that at some point in the derivation a clitic can incorporate into Infl only if Infl doesn�t already host an attracted inflectional morpheme. This idea holds the key for the enclisis/proclisis divide. Enclisis, i.e. clitic incorporation into Infl, is disallowed in Romance finite clauses where the uninterpretable feature of Infl selectively attracts the person-number agreement phi-set; it is legitimate in Semitic and European Portuguese finite clauses in which the same feature is checked through Agree.
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss control and raising in the Balkan languages, which lack infinitives and make use of mood distinctions instead. The ±finite distinction is crucially involved in most analyses of these phenomena since subjunctive clauses can be characterized as +finite. The question then is whether the empty subject in control subjunctive complements is PRO or pro and whether raising is possible out of the relevant complements. In order to provide an analysis of these issues, I will first consider the notion of finiteness as such, and in particular how it interacts with mood. It will be argued that finiteness is not a property solely associated with Tor Agr but is a property of the C system that interacts with the inflectional domain and the properties of the selecting predicate in complement clauses.
In terms of its linguistic and cultural make-up, the continent of South America provides linguists and anthropologists with a complex puzzle of language diversity. The continent teems with small language families and isolates, and even languages spoken in adjacent areas can be typologically vastly different from each other. This volume intends to provide a taste of the linguistic diversity found in South America within the area of clause subordination. The potential variety in the strategies that languages can use to encode subordinate events is enormous, yet there are clearly dominant patterns to be discerned: switch reference marking, clause chaining, nominalization, and verb serialization. The book also contributes to the continuing debate on the nature of syntactic complexity, as evidenced in subordination.
Using data from a variety of languages such as Blackfoot, Halkomelem, and Upper Austrian German, this book explores a range of grammatical categories and constructions, including tense, aspect, subjunctive, case and demonstratives. It presents a new theory of grammatical categories - the Universal Spine Hypothesis - and reinforces generative notions of Universal Grammar while accommodating insights from linguistic typology. In essence, this new theory shows that language-specific categories are built from a small set of universal categories and language-specific units of language. Throughout the book the Universal Spine Hypothesis is compared to two alternative theories - the Universal Base Hypothesis and the No Base Hypothesis. This valuable addition to the field will be welcomed by graduate students and researchers in linguistics.
In this thesis I ponder over a constellation of phenomena that revolve around switch reference and coordination, drawing mainly on their instantiation in Kisedje (Je, Brazil). I start by investigating Klsedje's case system. In this language there is a case split along the finite/non-finite axis. I argue that nominative is assigned by INFL, whereas ergative is assigned to the subject of INFL-less clauses. Importantly, the particles I take to instantiated INFL in Kisedje don't have tense semantics, but rather modal semantics. Investigating other properties of this modal INFL in Klsedje, I can determine the fine structure of its clause. This knowledge allows me to argue that the construction that has been identified elsewhere as clause chaining is actually asymmetric clausal coordination. The special properties that seem to distinguish clause chaining from asymmetric clausal coordination are argued to fall out from the structure of the clause in Kisedje. I further propose that the same type of structure is found in the other languages where asymmetric coordination has been called clause chaining. Asymmetric clausal coordination in Kisedje features morphology which indicates whether adjacent conjuncts have the same or different subjects (switch-reference marking). Important evidence for understanding how switch-reference is computed will come from the study of a deletion phenomenon that happens in the neighborhood of switch-reference markers in Kisedje. Besides isolating evidence for a direct agreement relation between switch-reference marking conjunction and the subject of one of the conjuncts, this study makes a contribution to the theory of morphology. Knowing the structure of the clause in Kisedje and the featural composition of switch-reference markers allows me to support a specific theory of switch-reference computation. Given this theory, I argue that asymmetric coordination (the kind of coordination where switch-reference is marked) instances an X-structure, whereas symmetric coordination (which can't be marked for switchreference) instances a flat structure. Such structural difference also allows me to explain other differences between symmetric and asymmetric coordination. Thesis Supervisor:
Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1978), pp. 157-190
In this major new work Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell set out to establish a general framework for the investigation of linguistic change. Systematic cross-linguistic comparison of syntactic change across a wide variety of languages is used to construct hypotheses about the universals and limits of language change more generally. In particular, the authors seek to move closer towards describing the range of causes of syntactic change to develop an understanding of the mechanisms of syntactic change, and to provide an understanding of why some languages undergo certain changes and not others. The authors draw on languages as diverse as Pipil and French, Georgian and Estonian, and the data presented is one of the book's great strengths. Rigor and precision are combined here with a great breadth of scholarship to produce a unique resource for the study of linguistic change, which will be of use to scholars and students alike.
Languages that have aspectually-conditioned ergativity splits generally oppose a "perfect" tense (often called perfective or aorist), with ergative-absolutive case pattern, to an imperfective where case marking follows the nominative-accusative pattern. The split exists in main clauses in several northern Je languages, among which Mebengokre, though in a slightly different form. MRbengokre opposes two verbal forms that roughly express an aspectual opposition between a "perfect", and a perfective or unmarked aspect. Rather than being two forms of the verb that differ simply in an aspectual feature, however, these forms (herein referred to as A and B, respectively) differ in many important respects: 1. Form A: (a) has a wide range of temporally stative interpretations when not embedded; (b) heads ergative-absolutive clauses; (c) is the only verbal form that can be embedded; (d) when embedded, its temporal and aspectual interpretation depend on that of the main clause; 2. Form B: (a) has a perfective interpretation; advances narrative time; (b) heads nominative-accusative clauses; (c) can't be embedded. In this dissertation, I propose that the opposition between the A and the B form boils down to an opposition between a truly verbal form (the B form) and a nominal form of the verb (the A form), and that the change in category explains both the ergative marking and the perfect interpretation associated with the A form. I argue that nominalization underlies many aspectually-conditioned splits described in the literature, as well as being at the core of the perfect construction in languages such as French and Italian. For the analysis to go through, two propositions have to be worked out: (i) that ergativity is a given when there is nominalization, and (ii) that the interpretation of a nominalization used as a main clause is in fact that of the perfect.
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