Complex predicates, simple inflecting verbs, and “uninflecting verbs” in Pre-Basque
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Gontzal Aldai
Abstract
How might Basque have looked before it came in contact with Latin? This interesting line of research may give us an idea of what the pre-Indo-European languages of Europe might have looked like, and it may help clarify how much contact-induced change Basque might have undergone during the last two millennia or so. The present paper puts forward the hypothesis that, towards the end of the Era (BC), Pre-Basque used to have a small class of verbs. These verbs were inflected for person and tense-aspect (although we know little about the specific characteristics of this inflectional system). Together with this small class of verbs, Pre-Basque had a larger group of uninflecting elements that combined with the inflecting verbs to form complex predicates. The group of uninflecting elements included bare nouns, adjectives, possibly adverbs, ideophones, and what I will call “uninflecting verbs”. The exact nature of these “uninflecting verbs” is hard to determine at this point, but they may have constituted a distinct part of speech. Certainly, this type of verbal organization is reminiscent of one common in Northern Australia. Thus, this paper also compares the reconstruction proposed for Pre-Basque with the verbal system typical in Northern Australian languages, to conclude that the similarities are remarkable and, therefore, that the verbal organization of Pre-Basque was quite different from that of the modern Western European languages, including Modern Basque.
Funding source: Eusko Jaurlaritza
Acknowledgements
The present work profited from a visiting-scholar fellowship for research abroad, granted by the Basque Government, Department of Education, and completed at the UCSB Linguistics Department in 2016. I would like to thank the editors of Linguistics, Bernard Comrie, Marianne Mithun, Karen Tsai, the UCSB Linguistics community, and two anonymous reviewers for their help with earlier versions of this paper.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Postnominal relative clauses in Chinese
- Outlining a grammaticalization path for the Spanish formula en plan (de): A contribution to crosslinguistic pragmatics
- From connective construction to final particle: The emergence of the Korean disapproval marker hakonun
- Complex predicates, simple inflecting verbs, and “uninflecting verbs” in Pre-Basque
- What makes up a reportable event in a language? Motion events as an important test domain in linguistic typology
- Words are constructions, too: A construction-based approach to English ablaut reduplication
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Postnominal relative clauses in Chinese
- Outlining a grammaticalization path for the Spanish formula en plan (de): A contribution to crosslinguistic pragmatics
- From connective construction to final particle: The emergence of the Korean disapproval marker hakonun
- Complex predicates, simple inflecting verbs, and “uninflecting verbs” in Pre-Basque
- What makes up a reportable event in a language? Motion events as an important test domain in linguistic typology
- Words are constructions, too: A construction-based approach to English ablaut reduplication
- Oblique nominals, a verbal affix and late merge
- Experimental evidence supporting the overlapping distribution of core and exempt anaphors: Re-examination of long-distance bound caki-casin in Korean
- Reassessing the third person pronominal “copula” in spoken Israeli Hebrew
- Domain restriction in child Mandarin: Implications for quantifier spreading
- Nouns and verbs in the speech signal: Are there phonetic correlates of grammatical category?
