Verbal Categories

The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample, the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly, a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then, the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio, Beja, Maa). In conclusion, the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.

Natural language can be easily understood by everyone irrespective of their differences in age or region or qualification. Based on various theories proposed in psycho-
linguistics, Roger Schank came up with the proposition that ”the basis of natural language is conceptual and the conceptual base is inter-lingual”. According to Indian
grammatical tradition, ”all content words in a language are either activities or derived from activities”. Inspired by these two ideas we are proposing a new set of meaning primitives based on overlapping senses of verbs. Using these meaning primitives we are trying to develop a new ontological lassification of verbs.

We propose that meaning of a verb is composed of seven fundamental senses implicating different attribute sets. In this proposal maximally overlapping sense of verbs is
taken as ”happening” (Sanskrit bhAva), as in the Indian linguistic traditions. We have rendered it as a recursive form with a structure ”change of state in context”. Each fundamental sense is a ”kind of happening” giving different contiguity of states with different attribute set as context. We derive the meaning of verbs from a universal verb happening such that every verb is uniquely specified across languages. The method has been applied to develop ontologically informed etymon in English and Indian language, Sanskrit. The primitives along with ontological attributes have been used to explicate the meaning of verbs. This form of meaning specification of verbs is used to develop language independent ontological classification of verbs which in turn can be used in Natural Language Processing applications like semantic search and Machine Translation.

This thesis describes a family of derivations I call verbal attenuative. Verbal attenuatives denote events that are incomplete, deficient or in other way lesser than the norm. I investigate them on a convenience sample of 24 languages from different genera. Three classes are identified. The first one is semelfactive—a derivation that takes a minimal part of an event. The second one is delimitative—a derivation that takes an initial proper part, or a “portion”, of an event. The third one is discontinuative—a derivation that produces atelic processes with interruptions or low intensity. I discuss in detail the interaction of the derivations with lexical aspect and compare the semantics of the marker among different languages.

The paper discusses the cross-linguistic classification of evidential values (including the so-called admirative value) and proposes a typology of evidential systems based on the distinction between ‘direct’, ‘reflected’, and ‘mediated’ evidence.

Starting from and complementing their insights with observations that often originale in the non-English literature on modality, this paper attempts to supply the grammaticalized expressions ofmodalüy with a semantic map. The t er m "modality" is taken t o refer t o just those (four) domains in which possibility contrasts with necessity, and "semantic map' refers to a representation of cross-linguistically relevant synchronic and diachronic connections between modal, premodal, and postmodal meanings or uses. Special attention is given to meanings that are vague between possibility and necessity, to developments from possibility to necessity and vice versa, to postmodal meanings that can originale in either possibility or necessity, and to demodalization of non-epistemic modality.

The analysis of verb forms in this work has resulted in the conclusion about verbal aspect as an independent category in the frame of grammatical systems of Bosnian and Persian, the analysis of which instigates a whole range of new questions and predications of new perspectives in examining the category of aspect together with other verbal categries - Aktonsarten and tense in the scope of semantic and syntactic context. Every analysis of the aspectuality involves taking into consideration the following parameters: verbal  aspect, Aktionsart and the context.

The aim of this thesis is to examine whether the German-based creole language Unserdeutsch is a relexificated Tok Pisin. On the basis of a small corpus, the morphosyntax of the verb in Unserdeutsch is compared to three input languages: Tok Pisin (substratum), German (superstratum) and English (adstratum). It will become evident that the morphosyntax contains features of all three input languages. I claim that there are three main factors influencing the structural genesis of Unserdeutsch: firstly, the substratum influence of Tok Pisin, the Papua languages, the oceanic languages and a few further languages, secondly, the continuous contact with the lexifier language German as well as the contact with English after 1948, and thirdly, the category reduction and the regularization of verbal paradigms in favor of transparency.

The theory of language change has in recent years increased its explanatory repertoire by pointing out the role of language contact in determining which paths of development are entered and followed under specified conditions. In particular, language shifting – as unmonitored second language learning – is recognized as a powerful mechanism for introducing new verbal categories into language systems as well as leading to the loss of verbal categories from language systems. In this paper I will relate several of the most important structural changes and categorial differences in the verb systems of Proto-Germanic, Old English and Old High German to the different contact histories of these languages, among them: (1) the reduction of the Proto-Indo-European TAM system (TAM for tense, aspect, mood) to half its size in Proto-Germanic, (2) the existence of a double copular paradigm in Old English (and again in Irish English) but not in German; (3) a number of properties of English but not of German attributed to Celtic influence by Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto (2008), such as the loss of the affected possessor construction and the rise of the verbal noun in -ung/-ing and the progressive based on it.

Cilj ovog rada je analiza gramati~ke kategorije glagolskog aspekta, kao i analiza op}ih problema vezanih za glagolski aspekt i aspektualnost u perzijskom -ogranku indoiranske skupine jezika i bosanskom -ogranku slavenskih jezika, kroz semanti~ku i gramati~ku analizu aspekatskih formi u oba jezika. Ova kontrastivna analiza je po`eljna, tim vi{e {to neki nau~nici tvrde da samo slavenski i indoiranski jezici imaju kategoriju glagolskog aspekta, i zato {to samo u ovim jezicima postoji bliska korespondencija izme|u aspekatskih znaenja i morfolo{kih sredstava koja se upotrebljavaju da ih izraze 1 .

Abstract: This paper gives a schematic overview of the problems that arise in the analysis of verbal categories in Anatolian languages, mainly those concerning aspect and actionality. These languages are in a sense a “testing ground” for grammatical theory, since concrete usages often do not easily fit into the available theoretical classifications. In the article we bring together a number of examples, mainly from the Hittite language, which are representative for the discussion of the mutual relations between the categorisation of traditional grammar and the concrete embodiment of grammatical schemes in the texts themselves.

Der Band umfasst Beiträge zu einem Symposium über die „Zukunft von Grammatik – Die Grammatik der Zukunft“, das vom 12. bis 13. Februar 2016 zu Ehren des 80. Geburtstags von Werner Abraham an der LMU München abgehalten wurde. Thematisiert wird der Stellenwert von Grammatikschreibung, Grammatiktheorie und Universalgrammatik in einer Zeit, die sich zunehmend von der Beschreibung und Erklärung grammatischer Strukturen sowie von übereinzelsprachlichen Generalisierungen abwendet, was einer Entwissenschaftlichung von Linguistik gleichkommt. Der Band zeigt, dass die Grammatik der Zukunft weiterhin auf Generalisierungen auf hohem analytischen Niveau angewiesen ist; exemplarisch wird das in Beiträgen zu Modalität, Passiv, Auxiliarselektion, zur Grammatik der Sprechakte und nicht zuletzt am Beispiel der Kodierung von Zukunft in der Grammatik sowie weiteren grammatischen Kategorien, Phänomenen und Subdisziplinen (Insubordination, Diminutivbildungen, quantitativer und qualitativer Dialektologie) auf­gezeigt. Es wird deutlich, dass Sprachtheorien optische Instrumente darstellen, mit denen sprachliche Daten mit höherer Auflösung wahrgenommen werden können als mit theoriefernen und vermeintlich datennahen Ansätzen in Teilströmungen der aktuellen Linguistik.

The paper deals with verbal aspect in standard Lithuanian with reference to dialectal and areal data. The traditional view that Lithuanian possesses a binary category of aspect is rejected, since no strictly grammatical (morphosyntactic) phenomena are associated with either of the alleged aspects, and because the binary classification is to coarse to adequately represent the aspectual properties of Lithuanian verbs. Instead, a more detailed classification of predicates into actional (situation) types is proposed. Major mechanisms of aspectual derivation, such as telicizing prefixation, delimitative, semelfactive and iterative formations, are described. In addition to the traditionally recognized Past Habitual, another inflectional category with aspectual meaning is described for the first time, i.e. the Contituative expressed by the “external” prefix (te)be-. Periphrastic aspectual constructions, such as Perfect/Resultative and Avertive, are also analysed.

Il presente contributo mira a fornire una panoramica del fenomeno conosciuto come plurazionalità nelle lingue del mondo. Dopo una breve introduzione, mostrerò le principali funzioni che le marche plurazionali codificano a livello interlinguistico e cercherò di spiegare la loro multifunzionalità tramite il metodo delle mappe semantiche. Passerò poi ad analizzare le principali strategie di marcatura e a discutere uno dei problemi teorici ad esse correlati, nello specifico, se si possa realmente parlare di suppletivismo per quanto riguarda la strategia dell’alternanza della base. Quindi presenterò quali sono le sorgenti diacroniche che è possibile identificare a livello interlinguistico. Infine, mi soffermerò a riflettere sulle difficoltà di chi ha tentato di classificare le costruzioni plurazionali in categorie grammaticali prestabilite e considerate come universalmente valide. Alla luce dei dati analizzati, mostrerò come in realtà la comparazione tipologica non possa basarsi sulle categorie linguistiche, ma su concetti creati ad hoc (comparative concept) dai linguisti per poter rendere conto della diversità linguistica.

This paper discusses those features of the Lithuanian verbal system which happen to find no direct counterparts either in all the other languages of the East Baltic region, including the close genetic relatives of Lithuanian, or at least outside the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. These include features of morphology (i.e. productive infixation in the Present tense and lack of prefix-stacking), verbal categories (inflectional Past Ha-bitual, Avertive, Continuative, Restrictive), and broader patterns of verbal morphosyntax (use of impersonal passive for the marking of evidentiality, non-Nominative case-marking of subjects and objects in non-finite clauses). With respect to some of these features it is shown that Lithuanian has generalized and extended patterns inherited from the proto-language to a degree unknown to its neighbours, while other features are purely local innovations. Speculative preliminary remarks on possible explanations of the lack of areal spread of the unique features of Lithuanian are also included.

Abbruch und Übertragung -ein sprachlicher Vorgang und seine sprachdiachronischen Folgen Im Französischen heißt "er ist" ‚il est', nach den Ausspracheregeln *ilε+. In der Frage "ist er?" ‚est-il?' erscheint in der Aussprache nicht *[ ε-il+, sondern *εtil+. Offensichtlich "erinnert sich" die Sprache daran, dass [t] (z.B. im Lateinischen) noch ausgesprochen wurde und in der Frageform den eigentlich erwarteten Hiat "überbrückt". Die so -eigentlich aus historischen Gründen -möglich gewordene Hiatüberbrückung leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag dazu, eine im Französischen als "angenehm" empfundene Sprechstruktur (Stichwort: "mot phonétique") Konsonant-Vokal-Konsonant-Vokal usw. zu erzielen. Bei ‚il y a' "es gibt" (lateinisch: "illud hic habet") wird in der Frageform "gibt es?" dann genau dieses [t] nicht nur sprachlich eingefügt, sondern auch mitgeschrieben: ‚y a-t-il?', und auch in Phrasen, bei denen man eigentlich kein [t] erwartet (quand-il, rend-il), wird es im entstehenden Hiat sprachlich realisiert. Eine bestimmte sprachliche Erscheinung "bricht" also von einer vorgegebenen Struktur "ab" und wird auf eine andere "übertragen".

This collection presents typological work on tense, aspect, and epistemic modality in a variety of languages and against the background of different schools of thinking, among which the St. Petersburg Typological School developed and so masterfully implemented by the Petersburg linguist, Vladimir Petrovich Nedjalkov. The volume honors this reputed scholar for his life work. It is in mainly this spirit that the following scholars have contributed to the volume: T. Tsunoda on Warrungu (Australian indigeneous language), L. Kulikov on Vedic, K. Kiryu on Japanese, Korean and Newari, N. Sumbatova on Svan (from the Kartvelian group), T.Bulygina & A. Shmelev, V. Plungian, Y. Poupynin, E. Rakhilina and G. Silnitsky on Russian, W. Boeder on Georgian, R. Thieroff on aorist and imperfect in European languages, on Russian, L. Johanson on Kipchak Turkic, I. Dolinina on Russian, N. Kozintseva on Old and Modern Eastern Armenian, Ch. Lee on Korean, W. Abraham on split ergative languages and German on Russian, on Russian, and K. Ebert on Kalmyk.

It has been known before that, while new verbal forms often develop first in assertive main predications, archaic forms tend to be preserved either in subordinate or in non-indicative uses. This presentation deals with the history of non-assertive verbal moods in Samoyedic languages, which in some cases are etymological remnants of older forms with a broader meaning. These forms have been ousted by newer forms in the indicative, but have been preserved in modal contexts and thus have developed into separate moods.
This abstract was published in: Проблемы типологии и общей лингвистики. Международная конференция, посвященная 100-летию со дня рождения А. А. Холодовича: Материалы. СПб., 2006. С. 41—45.

This paper explores how individuals describe their residential trajectory. Based on more than 50 interviews with residents from three municipalities in Switzerland, it seeks to understand how individuals combine geographic categories and specific places in the narrative of their residential history. The most frequent categories cited are “city,” “countryside,” and “village.” These categories are used and characterized in different ways.
By contrast, though all interviewees live in the “mountain” zone as defined by the Swiss authorities, “mountain” is a relevant category only for some interviewees, who are mostly attracted to their residential area by leisure opportunities. Approaching residential narratives through geographic categories sheds new light on dwelling and housing issues.

Janda et al. (2013) propose an analysis of Russian aspectual prefixes as verb classifiers, arguing that the prefix which forms the 'natural perfective' from a given verb serves to classify that verb according to its semantic characteristics. This analysis contrasts with the traditional analysis of Russian aspect, described by Tixonov (1998) and others, in which natural perfectives are formed via the addition of 'empty' prefixes which contribute no semantic content of their own. In Tohono O’odham (formerly known as Papago, an Uto-Aztecan language spoken in present-day Arizona and Mexico), as in Russian, there is a broad two-way distinction between two aspects, perfective and imperfective (Saxton 1982:232). In a fashion similar to the traditional aspectological assumption that there are lexically empty perfectivizing prefixes in Russian, traditional analyses of O’odham aspect posit a process of lexically empty perfectivization. In O’odham, the perfective is usually considered to be formed from the imperfective by truncation of the final consonant, in large part due to a lack of clear and separable semantic content in that segment (Mason 1950; Hale 1965; Saxton 1982; Zepeda 1983; Hill & Zepeda 1992; Kosa 2008). In this paper, I argue instead that O’odham imperfective verbs are formed from perfective verbs by suffixation, and that the suffixes involved are not ‘empty’, but serve a verb-classifying function similar to that of aspectual prefixes in Russian. Imperfectivizing suffixes have been proposed in the literature, by Dolores (1913) and Stonham (1994), but this hypothesis has not yet been systematically investigated. This paper represents a first attempt to do so. Data for this study are drawn from a nearly 5,000-verb database created from a two-volume dictionary of Tohono O’odham usage (Mathiot 1973a; 1973b). A preliminary analysis of these verbs supports a correlation between the final consonant of the imperfective and the verb’s lexical semantics, demonstrating that like those of Russian, O’odham aspectual morphemes fulfill the criteria for a verb classifier system as described by McGregor (2002), and providing further evidence that research on Slavic aspect can inform typological studies of verbal aspect cross-linguistically.

Natural language can be easily understood
by everyone irrespective of their differ-
ences in age or region or qualification. The
existence of a conceptual base that under-
lies all natural languages is an accepted
claim as pointed out by Roger Schank in
his Conceptual Dependency (CD) theory.
Inspired by the CD theory and theories
in Indian grammatical tradition, we pro-
pose a new set of meaning primitives in
this paper. We claim that this new set
of primitives captures the meaning inher-
ent in verbs and help in forming an inter-
lingual and computable ontological classi-
fication of verbs. We have identified seven
primitive overlapping verb senses which
substantiate our claim. The percentage of
coverage of these primitives is 100% for
all verbs in Sanskrit and Hindi and 3750
verbs in English.

The corpus-based analysis of the omission of esse in the Aeneid goes deeper than was possible in traditional stylistics and, as such, is an example of how state-of-the-art linguistic analyses can cast new light on literary works, considerably enhancing our comprehension of these. The study of sum in the Aeneid provides some interesting and unexpected data, such as the greater presence of verbal forms in direct speech—a discursive type which is, on the face of it, more suitable for elliptical phenomena—than in narration. An initial statistical analysis shows that these occurrences are inversely proportional: the longer the narrative text, the fewer verbal forms of sum are found. Using a multilayered linguistic analysis, Cabrillana claims that several factors might account for this behaviour of sum: the use of grammatically marked verbal forms (for the tense, mood, person and number) in direct speech makes the lexical presence of such forms indispensable, while co-causal factors can also occur, such as pragmatic focalization of the verbal form and the presence of impressive illocutionary force, as well as lexical-semantic factors (quasi-formulaic constructions or the expression of a specific semantic notion through esse).

Natural language can be easily understood by everyone irrespective of their differences in age or region or qualification. The existence of a conceptual base that underlies all natural languages is an accepted claim as pointed out by Schank in his Conceptual Dependency (CD) theory. Inspired by the CD theory and theories in Indian grammatical tradition, we propose a new set of meaning primitives in this paper. We claim that this new set of primitives captures the meaning inherent in verbs and help in forming an inter-lingual and computable ontological classification of verbs. We have identified seven primitive overlapping verb senses which substantiate our claim. The percentage of coverage of these primitives is 100% for all verbs in Sanskrit and Hindi and 3750 verbs in English.

The paper discusses verbal markers meaning ‘go in order to P’ and ‘come in order to P’ in languages of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Special attention is paid to Forest Nenets and some Tungusic languages. Andative vs. ventive opposition (expressing, respectively, motion from and to the deictic center) is identified in Forest Nenets for the first time. In Forest Nenets, these markers are non-implicative, i. e., in order to use them, the goal situation P does not need to have taken place in the actual world (even where they mark finite verbs in indicative sentences with past reference), only the motion situation. Though most Tungusic languages also have more than one directional-purposive marker, these usually show a different type of an opposition, namely that between ‘go in order to P’ and ‘go in order to P and come back’. The former markers are not deictically oriented, while the latter differ from typical andative markers in that their meaning has a reditive component (‘returning to the initial point’).
As a typological background, the paper also briefly considers data of some languages spoken in other areals. Morphemes with similar, but often not entirely identical meanings, attested cross-linguistically, are usually described as markers of associated motion or motion-cum-purpose categories. The latter term suits the discussed Siberian-language markers best, because, in contrast to the former term, it highlights both the syntactic role of the motion situation participant (where s/he is coreferent with the S/A-participant of the goal situation) and the temporal sequence of the situations.
The article also proposes some observations on the possible grammaticalization paths of motion-cum-purpose markers and provides a tentative list of typological parameters which can be relevant for this domain.

В статье рассматриваются глагольные показатели со значениями ‘пойти, чтобы Р’ и ‘прийти, чтобы Р’ в языках Сибири и Дальнего Востока. Особое внимание уделяется противопоставлению андатива и вентива в лесном ненецком языке и дейктически неориентированным направительным показателям в ряде тунгусо-маньчжурских языков. Кроме того, привлекаются данные языков других семей и ареалов, в которых обнаруживаются морфемы со схожей, но не идентичной семантикой, описываемые в литературе как показатели глагольной ориентации, «сопутствующего движения» или «движения с целью». Статья содержит также обсуждение возможных путей грамматикализации направительных показателей и предварительный список их свойств, являющихся параметрами межъязыкового варьирования.