delocutive

[Frans Plank]

Dear colleagues knowledgable about languages other than Germanic and Romance,

do you know of instances of delocutive morphology in any language you are
knowledgable about?  -- that is, of bound morphology of whatever kind being
used to form verbs which mean, basically, 'to say "X" (to someone)', where
"X" can be
(a)  a pronoun of (formal/informal) address,
(b)  a term of (possibly abusive) address,
(c)  an interjection,
(d)  something else (please specify).

Examples from German (where -en is the infinitival suffix, -z the
delocutive one):
(a)  jemanden du-z-en  'to say "thou" to s.o.'
(b)  jemanden verhunzen (< ver-hund-z-en)  'to say "dog" to s.o' (basic
meaning)
(c)  aech-z-en  'to say "ach!"'  (a deep sigh)
(d)  ---

If there is such delocutive morphology in "your" language, is it dedicated
to just this one function, or does it have other, and perhaps primary,
functions too (e.g., aspect/aktionsart ones such as iterative;
intensification;  derivation of verbs of sound/noise production or of other
semantic domains)?  Whether dedicated or shared, would you know anything
about the historical source of such delocutive morphology?

You may know the famous paper on delocutives by Benveniste.  But I wonder
whether anything seriously crosslinguistic has been done since.  Any leads?

Frans Plank



Frans Plank
Sprachwissenschaft
Universitaet Konstanz
D-78457 Konstanz
Germany
E-mail:  frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de
Tel:   +49-(0)7531-88 2656, home +49-(0)7531-57450
Fax:   +49-(0)7531-88 4190