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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Le 16/09/2013 08:56, Guillaume Jacques
a écrit :<br>
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<div dir="ltr">Dear Andrej,
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I would be interested to know why exactly you believe
that the prefixing character or Athabaskan is counter to
expectations, given the V-final word order. I have some
guesses why you say that, but please clarify. For
example, Indo-Europeanists apply special efforts to
explain why IE has suffixal personal inflection, going
back to subject pronouns, in spite of the SV order in
the known IE languages.<br>
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<div>I refer here to the debate concerning cross-category
harmony (see the references in my article), basically in
this particular case the notion that OV word order and
suffixes are connected because both are modifier-head; NB:
the idea behind this is that (at least some of the)
affixes are heads. To quote Hawkins (1988): "The affixal
head of a word is or-dered on the same side of its
subcategorized modifier(s) as P isordered relative to NP
within PP, and as V is ordered relative to adirect object
NP". </div>
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<div>This idea is this very much present especially in
generative circles, and I believe deserves to be examined
seriously. I had to kinds of reactions; a fieldwork
linguist/typologist told me that "it is so obvious that
this principle is wrong that it is not interesting to
argue against it", while a generative linguist said that
the data in my article "show that Rgyalrong used to be
SVO". <br>
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***<br>
Bonjour !<br>
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It can be first noted that a clear example of a language with a
rigid verbal template involving prefixes is ** French **, though I'm
not sure people agree on that.<br>
So I wonder what generative linguists would infer about what French
used to be, from what French now is. Might be fun...<br>
In my opinion, the core of the issue is that the belief that there
are typological laws or a universal mold (UG or whatever) is
widespread and quite possibly false.<br>
There is much more leeway in these features than is usually
acknowledged. Closely related languages may differ and the
assignment of features to a language may not be adequate.<br>
<br>
A.<br>
***<br>
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<div>Here, we must distinguish two things. There are
prefixes whose placement in the verbal template is the
same as the corresponding free word in the sentence.
Clearly, it is not a mystery why postpositions were
incomporated (like bi- in bi-hoosh'aah "I learn") or why
person markers are prefixes. These are only marginally
interesting - it is still an interesting fact that in most
verb final languages, at least in Eurasia, person markers
are grammaticalized as suffixes rather than prefixes. </div>
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<div>What is more interesting is how complex predicates are
grammaticalized (since in this case, arguably, we
originate from a structure where both elements were verbs,
independent head by themselves). In strict verb-final
languages, as far as I know, it is generally the case that
all verb complements are preverbal (actually here Dixon's
distinction between complement and complementation
strategy is useful). I haven't studied Navajo far enough
to be sure that this is always the case too in Athabaskan,
but it seems that it is the case too. Now, if you have a
construction with an auxiliary verb such as V Aux, you
expect that it grammaticalizes as a suffix, exactly
following the order in the original sentence. The kind of
phenomena that interests me is when auxiliaries (or simply
"what would correspond to the main verb in European
languages") are grammaticalized as prefixes in these
languages, because this precisely goes counter to the Head
Ordering principle. Of course, the idea is that they are
grammaticalized in this case from parataxis or serial verb
constructions (thus coming from a non-embedded structure).
In these cases, there was a choice between the harmonic
embedded construction and the disharmonic embedded one,
and the diharmonic construction was favoured.</div>
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<div>This scenario has been proposed for Athabaskan by Givon
(2000), who suggests that the "perfective prefixes" ghʉ-,
nʉ- and sʉ- in Tolowa (the last two ones corresponding to
the ni- and the perfective si- conjugation in Navajo, I
presume) originate from verbs (in serial verb
constructions). I would like to know what Athabaskianists
think of that, to what extent this is a workable
hypothesis or whether it is too speculative. Also, are
there other cases of prefixes in the verbal template of
Athabaskan languages that could be shown to have
grammaticalized from auxiliaries?</div>
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<div>The conclusion is that the head ordering principle is
not an active constraint on diachronic change, and that
the fact that most SOV languages are mainly suffixing
could be a historical accident (or due to typological
convergence in areas such as Eurasia and the Andes), not
the result of a universal principle. <br>
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***<br>
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I'm afraid it's indeed not a "constraint" because it's more a
theoretical artefact.<br>
Facts are stubborn...<br>
<br>
A.<br>
***<br>
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Also, modern Athabaskan have variable verb stem finals
that is mostly reconstructed as going back to suffixes
and, actually, series of suffixes. Most of the
Athabaskan prefixes are relatively recent, and there is
a reconstructable stage at which prefixes (conjunct)
were combined with a number of suffixes. <br>
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<div> Actually, the focus here is not so much how the
Ursprache looked like in its earliest recoverable stage as
to how the verbal template came to be the way it is. It is
clear that many prefixes in the verbal template of
Athabaskan are recent, especially the first position which
is basically incorporated postposition with their
possessive prefix. </div>
<div>Closer to the stem, the person prefixes are also
transparent, though they do present strange behaviour
(like the 2sg ni- becoming high tone í- when preceded by
a conjunct prefix - I someone has an explanation for that,
I am interested to hear). </div>
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<div>Sorry for this long message - I still feel it is not
completely clear enough, </div>
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***<br>
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Thank you for sharing your paper.<br>
<br>
A.<br>
***<br>
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