<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div>Following from Eva's point:<br></div>one problem is, I think, assuming that "the verb that means 'do' ", and "the verb that means 'become' " are part of this system.<br></div>We know that verbs can be underspecified semantically (a point Eva raises); we know that many auxiliary constructions employ semantically empty inflectional entities, 'light verbs'.<br><br></div><div>The following Skou examples show the verb li, and its inflectional variants, being used with a generic 'do' sense, as the inflectional member of a N+V complex predicate. Any attempt to associate semantic content with the verb li beyond 'verb' will fail; it simply inflects, and has no inherently specified valency, semantics, or restrictions. One way to characterise 'polysemies' is to think not of the extension of a meaning, but the accretion of constructions to a semantically 'light' inflecting element.<br><br></div><div>Skou examples:<br></div><div><br></div><div>Ya mè=pi?<br></div><div>thing 2SG=2SG."do"<br></div><div>'What are you doing?'<br></div><div><br></div><div>'Auxiliary':<br></div><div>Pí nì=li mè.<br></div><div>speech 1SG=do 2SG<br></div><div>'I spoke to you.'<br></div><div><br></div><div>Naké boeboe ke=li<br></div><div>dog growl <a href="http://3SG.NF" target="_blank">3SG.NF</a>="do"<br></div><div>'The dog growled.'<br><br></div><div>Inchoative:<br></div><div>Ke kurù ke=li.<br></div><div><a href="http://3SG.NF" target="_blank">3SG.NF</a> teacher <a href="http://3SG.NF" target="_blank">3SG.NF</a>="do"<br></div><div>'He became a teacher.'<br></div><div><br></div>Nì pá-nì=ne fèng li.<br></div>1SG house-1SG.GEN=1SG.DAT bad "do"<br></div>'My house became bad.'<br><br></div>Mè=angku-mè=me bápáli pe=li.<br></div>2SG=child-2SG.GEN=2SG.DAT big 3SG.F="do"<br></div>'Your daughter has grown up.'<br><br></div>Causative:<br></div>Ke=li=ko pe=fu.<br></div>3SG.NF-"do"=OBJ 3SG.F=scared<br></div>'He frightened her.'<br><br></div>Pe nì=li pe pá hápa pe=tue-tue<br>3SG.F 1SG="do" 3SG.F house small 3SG.F=RED-3SG.F."do"<br></div>'I made her build a small house.'<br><br></div>Desiderative/Irrealis:<br></div><div>Ne móe ne=yú ne ti-ti.<br></div><div>1PL fish 1PL=search.for 1PL RED-1PL."do"</div><div>'We're going to look for fish.'<br><br></div><div>Kóe=ing a te=rá-r-á ti.<br></div><div>sago=the 3PL-RED-3PL-roast 3PL."do"<br></div><div>'They want to roast the sago.'<br></div><div><br>í bápáli nì=fue=ko nì=li-li ka.<br></div>snake big 1SG=see=OBJ 1SG-RED-do NEG<br></div>'I don't like seeing large snakes.' (= 'When I see large snakes, I don't want (it).'<br><br></div>-Mark<br><div><div><div><br>
<br></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 6 July 2015 at 23:43, David Gil <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gil@eva.mpg.de" target="_blank">gil@eva.mpg.de</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
Dear Eva,<br>
<br>
Thanks for this valuable contribution.<br>
<br>
I suspect that languages of the small Biakic subgroup of
Austronesian (Biak, Roon and Dusner) might provide a counterexample
to your proposed generalization, but I'm not entirely sure of this.
What is clear is that the form in question, "be", expresses 'give',
'make'/'do', 'become' and causation, without any valency-changing
marking. (One qualification: in Biak but not Roon or Dusner, the
'make'/'do' function of "be" has been largely but apparently not
entirely replaced by another lexical item, "frur".) What I am not
yet clear about is whether the causative function of "be" in these
languages is limited to what you refer to internal causation. I
suspect that it is not, but will need to double-check this; I'm
grateful to you for driving home the importance of this distinction.<br>
<br>
For some more information on the causative function of "be" in Biak,
I would recommend a look at pp. 392-396 of:<br>
<br>
Heuvel, Wilco van den (2006) Biak, Description of an Austronesian
Language of Papua, LOT, Utrecht.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
<br>
David<div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div>On 06/07/2015 04:46, Eva
Schultze-Berndt wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div style="direction:ltr;font-family:Tahoma;color:#000000;font-size:14pt"><br>
<div>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> Dear David and all,</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> A do/become polysemy (even
without detransitivisation operations of any sort) is
attested in various languages – I have described it for the
Australian (W. Mirndi) language Jaminjung (Schultze-Berndt
2000: Ch 5) and more generally in (Schultze-Berndt 2008),
where I also mention Samoan (Mosel & Hovdhaugen 1992:
113) and Yimas (Foley 1991: 293-300). </p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> In the 2008 paper I argue that
the notion of ‘internal causation’, as per Levin &
Rappaport Hovav (1994, 1995), can account for these diverse
uses of ‘do’ verbs as well as additional uses attested
cross-linguistically, e.g. with translation equivalents of
‘happen’, ‘feel’, and ‘exhibit property’. That is, verbs
like these do not have the semantic component of agentivity
and control associated with ‘do’ verbs in an SAE perspective
(and consequently with a primitive predicate ‘DO’ in various
decompositional semantic frameworks!) but rather encode that
a participant manifests an event, a state change, a quality
or a condition which corresponds to an inherent property of
this participant. (Cf. Levin & Rappaport Hovav’s (1995:
91) definition of internally caused eventualities as
“conceptualised as arising from inherent properties of their
arguments”, applied by them to English verbs like <i>tremble</i>
or <i>glitter</i>).</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> In Jaminjung, the inchoative use
of the verb is indeed restricted to internally caused state
changes, e.g. ‘become big’ = ‘grow’, ‘become night’, or
‘turn into a devil’ (see ex. below). State changes like
‘break’ or ‘open’ – corresponding to what Levin &
Rappaport Hovav (1995) term ‘externally caused state
changes’ – are encoded in Jaminjung by complex verbs which
are formed with a different verb, ‑<i>ijga</i> ‘go’. This is
the pattern I would predict for other languages with a ‘do’
/ ‘become’ “polysemy” (without valency change), but I would
be interested to learn otherwise.</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;text-align:justify;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> Examples
from Jaminjung are below. The same verb functions as a
generalised action verb and a speech framing verb with
quotations (a polysemy widespread in Australian languages),
an inchoative verb which encodes the transition into a state
or class, as well as a light verb with predicates of
internal motion, light/sound emission, and physical or
emotional condition. (It does not function as a verb of
creation (‘make’) though):</p>
<ol>
<li style="margin:4px 0px 0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <i><span style="white-space:pre-wrap"></span></i><br>
</li>
<li style="margin:4px 0px 0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"><i> yurru-wu-</i><b><i>yu</i></b>
</li>
</ol>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> do.what=now? <span style="white-space:pre-wrap"></span>1PL.INCL>3SG-POT-do</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> ‘what are we going to do?’</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;text-align:justify;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;text-align:justify;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> <span style="white-space:pre-wrap"></span><i>wurrguru<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>nganthu-wu-</i><b><i>yu</i></b></p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> devil <span style="white-space:pre-wrap"></span>2SG>3SG-POT-do</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> ‘you will turn into a devil’ </p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<ol>
<li style="margin:4px 0px 0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"><i>nga</i><b><i>-yunggu</i></b><i>-m</i>
</li>
</ol>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> itchy / sad<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>1SG>3SG-do-PRS</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> ‘I am/feel itchy/sad’ (lit.: ‘I
do itchy / sad’)</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> Jaminjung also uses the ‘give’
verb to form the reflexive/reciprocal of ‘say’ since the
‘say/do’ verb is defective in this respect (details also in
Schultze-Berndt 2000).</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;text-align:justify;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;text-align:justify;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> Foley, William A. (1991). <i>The
Yimas language of New Guinea</i>. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Helvetica"> Levin,
Beth, and Malka Rappaport Hovav (1994). 'A preliminary
analysis of causative verbs in English'. <i>Lingua, 92</i>,
35-77.</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Helvetica"> Levin,
Beth and Malka Rappaport Hovav (1995). <i>Unaccusativity:
at the syntax-lexical semantics interface</i>. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:22.7px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> Mosel,
Ulrike & Even Hovdhaugen (1992). <i>Samoan Reference
Grammar. </i>Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial">
Schultze-Berndt, Eva (2000). <i>Simple and complex verbs in
Jaminjung: A study of event categorisation in an
Australian language.</i> (PhD), University of Nijmegen,
Nijmegen. </p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial">
Schultze-Berndt, Eva (2008). 'What do “do” verbs do? The
semantic diversity of generalised action verbs', in
Elisabeth Verhoeven, Stavros Skopeteas, Yong-Min Shin, Yoko
Nishina and Johannes Helmbrecht (eds.), <i>Studies on
Grammaticalization</i>. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter,
185-208. </p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> Best,</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial"> Eva</p>
<p style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:36px;font-size:14px;font-family:Arial;min-height:16px"> <br>
</p>
<div style="font-family:Tahoma;font-size:13px">
<div style="font-family:Tahoma;font-size:13px">
<div style="font-family:Tahoma;font-size:13px">
<div style="font-family:Tahoma;font-size:13px">
<div style="font-family:Tahoma;font-size:13px">
<div style="font-family:Tahoma">
<div style="font-family:Tahoma">
<div style="font-family:Tahoma">
<div style="font-size:13px;font-family:Tahoma"><span style="font-size:medium"><br>
</span></div>
<div style="font-size:13px;font-family:Tahoma"><span style="font-size:medium"><br>
</span></div>
<div style="font-size:13px;font-family:Tahoma"><span style="font-size:medium"><br>
</span></div>
<div style="font-size:13px;font-family:Tahoma"><span style="font-size:medium">-------------------------------------------------------
</span> </div>
<div style="font-size:13px;font-family:Tahoma"><span style="font-size:medium">Eva
Schultze-Berndt</span></div>
<div style="font-size:13px;font-family:Tahoma"><span style="font-size:medium">Professor of
Linguistics</span></div>
<div style="font-size:13px;font-family:Tahoma"><span style="font-size:medium">Linguistics and
English Language</span></div>
<div style="font-size:13px;font-family:Tahoma"><span style="font-size:medium">School of Arts,
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<div style="font-size:13px;font-family:Tahoma"><span style="font-size:medium">The University of
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<div style="font-size:13px;font-family:Tahoma"><span style="font-size:medium">E-mail: <a href="mailto:eva.schultze-berndt@manchester.ac.uk" target="_blank">eva.schultze-berndt@manchester.ac.uk</a></span></div>
<div style="font-family:Tahoma"><font size="3">Office
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Building</font></div>
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</div>
<div style="font-family:Times New Roman;color:#000000;font-size:16px">
<hr>
<div style="direction:ltr"><font face="Tahoma" color="#000000" size="2"><b>From:</b>
Lingtyp [<a href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>]
on behalf of Lewis Lawyer [<a href="mailto:lclawyer@ucdavis.edu" target="_blank">lclawyer@ucdavis.edu</a>]<br>
<b>Sent:</b> 04 July 2015 00:37<br>
<b>To:</b> LingTyp<br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [Lingtyp] "become"<br>
</font><br>
</div>
<div>
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>Dear David,<br>
Another example for you---not a historical
source so much as a synchronic derivation:<br>
In Patwin (Wintuan family, Penutian
"superfamily", of California) the verb <i>lelu</i>
'make' can be reflexivized to express the
meaning 'become'. Similar to Dr. Dryer's Walman
example, but with 'make' rather than 'do' (<i>lelu</i>
never means 'do' in Patwin). Also perhaps more
agentive than prototypical 'become', though
sometimes translated that way.<br>
<br>
(1) ču pi depi no:p
lelu-nana-t'i.<br>
</div>
I DECL also deer make-REFL-FUT<br>
</div>
'I'm going to turn into a deer too.' (Whistler
1977:169)<br>
<br>
</div>
(2) k'učiʔa-ro p'o:rma-ro bo:
win lelu-nan-mu [...]<br>
</div>
small-PTCP bad-PTCP be person
make-REFL-SBJV<br>
</div>
(He) made himself a small and ugly person. (Radin
MS:103)<br>
<div>
<div>
<div><br>
<br>
</div>
Whistler, Kenneth W. 1977. Deer and Bear Children.
Speakers: Nora Lowell and Harry Lorenzo. In Northern
California Texts, edited by Victor Golla and Shirley
Silver, 158-179. International Journal of American
Linguistics Native American Texts Series 2(2).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.<br>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Radin, Paul. MS. Patwin Texts. Collected 1932,
from speaker Anderson Lowell. In the American
Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native
American Languages, American Philosophical Society.
Call number: 497.3 B63c P4b6-7.<br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<div>Cheers,<br>
</div>
<div>-Lewis<br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<br clear="all">
<br>
-- <br>
<div>
<div dir="ltr"><br>
Lewis C. Lawyer<br>
PhD Candidate in Linguistics<br>
University of California, Davis<br>
<a href="mailto:lclawyer@ucdavis.edu" target="_blank">lclawyer@ucdavis.edu</a></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
</div></div><span class=""><pre cols="72">--
David Gil
Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany
Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550333
Email: <a href="mailto:gil@eva.mpg.de" target="_blank">gil@eva.mpg.de</a>
Webpage: <a href="http://www.eva.mpg.de/%7Egil/" target="_blank">http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/</a>
</pre>
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