prefixing verbal template and OV

[Arnaud]

Le 16/09/2013 08:56, Guillaume Jacques a écrit :
> Dear Andrej,
>
>
>
>     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.
>
>
> 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".
>
> 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".
***
Bonjour !

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.
So I wonder what generative linguists would infer about what French used 
to be, from what French now is. Might be fun...
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.
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.

A.
***

>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
> 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.
***

I'm afraid it's indeed not a "constraint" because it's more a 
theoretical artefact.
Facts are stubborn...

A.
***


>
>
>     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.
>
>
>  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.
> 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).
>
> Sorry for this long message - I still feel it is not completely clear 
> enough,
>
***

Thank you for sharing your paper.

A.
***

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