etymology of WANT

[Bill Palmer]

Hi listers

Verbs meaning 'say' are common with a desiderative function, either as
an individual verb or in a serial construction, in quite a few Oceanic
languages. These (and 'say' verbs in the sense of introducers of
reported speech in general even if the do not have a desiderative
function) are usually distinct from a separate verb meaning 'talk' that
covers some of the territory covered by 'say' in English.

Torau (Northwest Solomonic, Bougainville) displays what is presumably
the usual crossover point in the grammaticisation of 'say' in this
direction. A verb occurs that introduces reported speech and can be
translated as 'say', where the subject of the complement clause refers
to the same individual as the subject of the quotative verb but uses a
pronoun of a different person category - an utterance that may translate
into English as something like 'He said "I will go"', with an
implicature of desire (it would not normally be used in a context where
the speaker means he has to go although he doesn't want to.) But it may
also occur in what is an otherwise identical construction but where the
subject of the complement clause has the same subject as the main
clause, or where the subject is omitted, in which case the literal
translation would be 'He said he will go', but where the meaning would
normally be translated by speakers as 'He wants to go.' I actually
suspect, although I haven't done a prosodic comparison, that the
distinction between reported speech and statements of desire of this
kind is a false dichotomy within the context of that language.

Bill Palmer

Dr Bill Palmer
Convenor
Pacific Languages Research Group
School of Humanities and Social Science
University of Newcastle
Central Coast Campus
Chittaway Rd
Ourimbah NSW 2258
ph 02 4348 4050
email bill.palmer at newcastle.edu.au
>>> Nick Thieberger <thien at unimelb.edu.au> 05/29/09 8:24 AM >>>
The verb ‘to say’ in South Efate also has a range of other functions
including: the expression of a purposive; marking inchoative or
incipient action; and acting as the verb ‘to want’. A morpheme with a
similar range of functions is noted for
Lolovoli by Hyslop (2001:386), and the verb ika in Anejom means both
‘say’ and ‘to want’ (Lynch 2000:162). The grammaticalization of the
verb ‘say’ as a complementizer or 'want' is not uncommon in languages
of the world (cf. Lord 1976;
Chapter 12; Saxena 1988).

Hyslop, Catriona. 2001. The Lolovoli dialect of the North-East Ambae
language, Vanuatu. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Lord, Carol. 1976. Evidence for syntactic reanalysis: from verb to
complementiser. Papers from the parasession on diachronic syntax.
Chicago: CLS. 179–191
Lynch, John. 2000. A grammar of Anejom. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics
Canberra:
Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies,
Australian
National University.
Saxena, Anju. 1988. On syntactic convergence: The case of the verb ‘say’
in
Tibeto-Burman. In Proceedings of the fourteenth annual meeting. Berkely,
California: Berkely Linguistics Society. 375–388.



Nick Thieberger, PhD
Assistant Professor
Language Documentation and Conservation
Department of Linguistics
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
1890 East-West Road
Honolulu, HI 96822



2009/5/28 Hilario De Sousa <hilario.desousa at usyd.edu.au>:
>
> *sorry for cross-posting, and thanks to those (mainly
Austronesianists) who
> have replied on the Papuan list!*
>
> Dear Austronesianists,
>
> Wayne Lawrence (wp.lawrence at auckland.ac.nz) is looking into
> the grammaticalisatin of 'desideratives' (both lexical and
> grammatical).  For instance, English «want» is
> grammaticalised from an original meaning of 'lack'.  An
> interesting case is the Japanese verbal suffix «-tai», which
> is said to come from «itai» 'sore, hurts', via 'extremely'
> (the earliest instances of -itai, in the late Heian period,
> have the interpretation of 'very'.  The path SORE -->
> EXTREMELY is also found in German «sehr» 'very', c.f. English
> «sore»).  Do you know of any other examples of EXTREMELY -->
> WANT?  The etymology of WANT in other languages would also be
> hugely appreciated.
>
> Hilário de Sousa on behalf of Wayne Lawrence
>
> _______________________________________________
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> An-lang at anu.edu.au
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>
>

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