Abstract
A crosslinguistically unusual case of morphological fusion, in which two clauses fuse morphologically in the absence of preceding syntactic fusion or clause union, is found in the East Caucasian language Agul. This phenomenon involves a set of “verificative” verbal forms (forms that seek ‘to find out the truth value or the value of an unknown variable’). The verificatives are completely morphologically bound, but manifest clear biclausal properties: in particular, the introduction of a new agentive argument by the verificative (the ergative “verifier”) causes no change in the argument structure of the embedded clause. This article argues that the Agul verificative has grammaticalized from the matrix verb ‘see’ plus an indirect question complement in the conditional form: over time, the two verbal heads have fused into one form. Partial parallels to this development can be found in the related languages Archi and Lezgian, where a semantic shift from ‘see’ to ‘check, find out’ is attested, together with a change in subject encoding from typically experiential (dative) to canonically agentive (ergative). Still, the complete morphologization of the verificative structure in Agul dialects remains exceptional given its comparatively recent origin, the infrequency of the construction, and the general absence of observed cases in which matrix verbs become fused with their complements.
Acknowledgements
I am pleased to thank my long-term collaborators Dmitry Ganenkov and Solmaz Merdanova for their continuing work on the Agul dialects and for fruitful discussions, as well as for providing many of the elicited examples cited in this paper. Most of the textual data from which the examples are drawn were collected as part of the Agul Documentation Project, supported by the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in 2005–2006 and 2008–2009.I am also grateful to Salminat Gasanova for discussing the Tpig dialect data, to Kerim Kerimov and Ayten Babaliyeva for their help with the Lezgian data and for providing the elicited Lezgian examples, and to Misha Daniel, Marina Chumakina, and Bulbul Musayeva for their comments and for providing the Archi examples.The current stage of research resulting in this paper has been supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation, project No. 14-18-02429.
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Appendix: Abbreviations used in examples
- add
additive
- adv
adverbializer
- aor
aorist
- apud
‘near’ localization
- cond
conditional
- cont
‘in contact’ localization
- conv
converb
- cop
copula
- dat
dative
- dem
demonstrative
- degr
degree converb
- elat
elative
- emp
emphatic
- erg
ergative
- evid
evidential
- fut
future
- gen
genitive
- hort
hortative
- imp
imperative
- in
‘inside’ localization
- inf
infitive
- intj
interjection
- ipf
imperfective
- juss
jussive
- lat
lative
- m
masculine (in Avar)
- mnr
manner converb
- neg
negation
- pf
perfective
- pl
plural
- prf
perfect/resultative
- prog
progressive
- proh
prohibitive
- prs
present
- pst
past
- pt
participle
- ptcl
particle
- q
question
- rdp
reduplication
- rep
reportative evidential
- s
substantivizer
- sub
‘under’ localization
- super
‘on, above’ localization
- term
terminative converb
- tmr
temporal form (of nouns)
- verif
verificative
- 1–4
genders (in Archi)
Aspectual stems of verbs (in Agul) and oblique stems of nouns are separated by dots. Unmarked values are given in round brackets. Bound parts of complex verbs are given in angle brackets.
©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Cooperation and coercion
- Case inflection of construct-state constructions in Dinka
- Permission and obligation intertwined: The twofold modal meaning of the Finnish jussive from a discourse perspective
- The syntax of Tagalog relative clauses
- Verb class, case, and order: A crosslinguistic experiment on non-nominative experiencers
- Morphological fusion without syntactic fusion: The case of the “verificative” in Agul
- Book Review
- Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti: The Diachrony of Negation
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Cooperation and coercion
- Case inflection of construct-state constructions in Dinka
- Permission and obligation intertwined: The twofold modal meaning of the Finnish jussive from a discourse perspective
- The syntax of Tagalog relative clauses
- Verb class, case, and order: A crosslinguistic experiment on non-nominative experiencers
- Morphological fusion without syntactic fusion: The case of the “verificative” in Agul
- Book Review
- Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti: The Diachrony of Negation