'Clausal' temporal constructions

[Marcel Erdal]

Dear Chad,
Turkish has a similar construction:

Dört gün-dür yagmur yag-Iyor
 4  day-COP rain rain-PRES.CONT
'It's been raining for four days'.

dIr is a copular particle following vowel harmony (it has the variants dir 
dIr dür dur depending on the previous vowel) which now has some modal use in 
standard Turkish but is still also used as a plain copula in some variants. 
It comes from the simple present of dur-, the verb 'to stand', and thus has 
a history similar to Spanish 'estar'.
Marcel Erdal

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chad Howe" <chowe at UGA.EDU>
To: <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2010 5:07 PM
Subject: 'Clausal' temporal constructions


Dear Typologists,

I’m working with a family of temporal constructions in Romance Languages
that are used to indicate meanings similar to ‘ago’ and ‘since/for’ in
English. For instance, the existential construction in French "il y a"
‘there is/are’ and the verb "hacer" ‘to do/make’ can occur with a
quantified temporal element to obtain either a punctual meaning (as in 1
and 2) or a durative one (as in 3 and 4), depending largely on the
modified verb. There are similar structures in other varieties of
Romance. Moreover, these structures can also occur post-verbally (e.g.,
"Je me suis mariée il y a quatre ans" ‘I got married four years ago’),
though the resulting meanings can be distinct.

French
(1) Il y a quatre ans (que) je me suis mariée.
Spanish
(2) Hace cuatro años (que) me casé.
‘It’s been four years since I got married.’ / ‘I got married four years
ago.’

French
(3) Il y a quatre ans que j’ habite ici.
Spanish
(4) Hace cuatro años que vivo aquí.
‘It’s been four years that I have lived here.’ / ‘I have lived here for
four years.’

These elements are typically treated as being composed of a finite verb
(e.g., "a" from "avoir" in French and "hace" from "hacer" in Spanish)
and a temporal complement. Despite what seems to be matrix clausal
structure, however, many sources treat these elements as adjunctival. I
would like to know more about similar ‘clausal’ structures in other
languages—i.e. structures in which an analogous set of temporal meanings
is obtained with an ostensibly verbal nucleus.

In a second and presumably related question, I’m also looking for
information regarding verbs used cross-linguistically for addition. For
instance, in English one can say “Two and two is/are four” or “Two and
two make/makes four”. In Spanish, the verbs used for this type of
calculation are similar “Dos y dos son [< "ser" 'to be'] cuatro”. I
would certainly appreciate any suggestions regarding any type of
literature on these structures.

Thanks in advance,
Chad Howe

-- 
-------------------------------
Lewis (Chad) Howe, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics
University of Georgia
Department of Romance Languages & Program in Linguistics
370J Gilbert Hall
Athens, GA 30602-1815
Office:  (706) 583-0792
Fax:  (706) 542-3287
URL: http://chadhowe.wordpress.com