Volume 33, Issue 3 - Special Issue: (Non-)finiteness, Issue Editor: Anne Tamm

We examine aspect, eventuality type and transitivity alternations in two types of nominalization in Ossetian, an Iranian language spoken in East Caucasus, focusing on how deverbal nominals differ from fully inflected clauses projected by the same VPs. The main empirical finding of the study is: nominalizations exhibit a wider range of syntactic and semantic possibilities than fully inflected clauses. The finite verb in Ossetian is either perfective or imperfective and shows Slavic-type aspectual composition, but (prefixless) nominalizations are aspectless and are associated with English-type aspectual composition. Besides, deverbal nominals allow for transitivity alternations even if a corresponding finite verb does not. Our account for the observed pattern is based on the hypothesis that in the course of derivation, the range of options available at the VP level is narrowed down by the elements of functional structure, specifically, Asp and T. We argue that the role of Asp is to impose a quantization requirement on its complement predicate, while T interacts with the structure generated at the VP level in determining transitivity of a clause. Nominals can be built before Asp and T are merged, hence the semantic contribution of those heads is not part of their meaning. It that way, nominals provide us with a more direct access to the true characteristics of the verb and its immediate projections at early stages of derivation.

A morphological asymmetry is shared by certain Dravidian (and Finnic) languages. The phonological shape of a negation element is dependent on the finiteness of the verb it negates. Pragmatic factors are identified that could motivate the development of this shared asymmetry, using evidence from the grammar of a Dravidian-influenced contact language. I will show that contrastive finiteness marking (finite and non-finite morphology) can facilitate the development of pragmatically-motivated linear reordering of affirmative clauses and negated clauses in order to accommodate new information structure conventions, extending the contrast to negated verbs by expanding the functional range of a negative imperative marker. Radical contact languages resulting from collective adult second language acquisition in naturalistic social contexts are typically presumed to feature reduced functional morphology, in which only highly salient contrasts, such as temporal contrasts, are formally instantiated. If a formal finiteness contrast and other relatively marked properties (“complexity”) could develop in a highly analytic contact language that did not previously have them, this suggests that such a sequence of changes is in fact as plausible among genetically-unrelated languages in a sprachbund as it is over longer periods of time in genetically-related languages. We can observe this by examining grammatical change in a language that previously lacked both a finiteness contrast and a corresponding negation asymmetry, but which developed both the contrast and the asymmetry as a result of contact with a genetically-unrelated language that has analogous properties. Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) has undergone grammatical change due to contact with Dravidian (primarily Sri Lankan Muslim Tamil). Several of these changes involve verb morphology and syntax, and are plausibly motivated by discourse-pragmatic triggers. Consideration of tense and (non-)finiteness phenomena, as well as their reflexes in SLM negation, suggests a discourse-pragmatic motivation for these changes. Two discourse processes could conspire to motivate the development of the new morphology in SLM. The first is a clausal asymmetry, in which the predicate representing the most recent event is ordinarily in focus, indicated by tense morphology and position of the clause relative to clauses referring to subsequent events. The second is the communicative need to reassign focus in certain contexts to a temporally non-primary clause, one referring to an event that did not take place first. In spite of a constraint in Dravidian languages blocking the marking of functional contrasts under negation (so that only a negation morpheme can be prefixed to the verb), negation morphology encodes an obligatory finiteness contrast, optimally supporting these information-structuring processes. The clause describing the most recent event in a sentence remains visibly finite under negation, when a temporally secondary clause is focused.

In this paper, we propose a uniform motivation for subject case alternations that align with distinctions in tense and aspect and those that align with a distinction between stage- and individual-level predication. We argue that both follow from an economical use of case marking that is made possible by grounding. If the argument function of an event participant can be determined on the basis of information available in the here and now, the use of case marking can be judged redundant and suspended because of economy.

The aim of this paper is to establish the hierarchy of “finiteness” in Polish based on “morphological” considerations relating to syncretism and alternations, which were taken to be the interface between the lexicon and syntax. The paper focuses on parasitic stem syncretism within the paradigm of eight verb forms in Polish. The eight forms exhibit numerous stem syncretism patterns where one stem forms a “parasitic” base for the formation of another verb. The major point is to argue for a scale of degrees of finiteness rather than any categorical two-way distinction between finite and non-finite forms. The paper suggests various new topics for further research, e. g. how person hierarchy relates to the finiteness hierarchy.