negative primary verbs

[Colin P Masica]

Sounds like an interesting and testable hypothesis to me. Let's test it! (I
can think of some exceptions to Hyp 8 and 9 already,in Dravidian. But Hyp 7
may hold.)

Colin Masica

> From: Paul Hopper <ph1u at ANDREW.CMU.EDU>
> Reply-To: Paul Hopper <ph1u at ANDREW.CMU.EDU>
> Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 15:30:40 -0500
> To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> Subject: Re: negative primary verbs
>
> Dear ALT List,
>
> Charles Ferguson in a 1972 article "Being in Bengali, with a note on
> Amharic" (John Verhaar, ed. The Verb 'BE' and Its Synonyms, part 5, 75-114,
> pub. D. Reidel) hyothesized the following universals, which may be of
> relevance in this exchange (Ex is an Existential "verb", and Cop is a
> copular "verb", though of course the term "verb" may not be appropriate):
>
> Hyp. 7 p. 109: If an Ex or Cop is grammatically unique, i.e. lacks
> criterial features of any major word class in the language, it will tend to
> have a grammatically unique negative, i.e. the negative will not be formed
> the way other negatives in the language are formed.
>
> Hyp. 8 p. 110: If Ex and Cop are lexically separate in the present tense,
> they tend to share a single past tense.
>
> Hyp. 9 p. 110 The negative of past forms of Ex and/or Cop tends to be more
> regular in formation than the present-tense negative.
>
> Paul Hopper
>
> ---------------------------
> Paul Hopper
> Paul Mellon Chair of Humanities
> College of Humanities and Social Sciences
> Carnegie Mellon University
> Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
> Telephone (412) 268-7174
> Fax (412) 268-7989
>