periphrastic forms plus negation

[Mathias Jenny]

Dear Peter

In Burmese, the position of the preverbal negation particle mə- is
either before the main verb or before the auxiliary (or secondary
verb), at least in some cases. In some cases, the negator must be
attached to the main verb. The flexible word order is found for
example with thà 'deposit', which as secondary verb indicates that an
activity is carried out with some temporary result, for example:

θu ba-hmá pyɔ̀ mə-thà phù.                       or         ba-hmá
mə-pyɔ̀ thà phù
3  what-ever say   NEG-deposit NEG                     what-ever
NEG-speak deposit NEG
'He didn't say anything.'

There seems to be no difference in meaning between the two forms, the
choice being rather an individual preference, with dialectal
differences in some cases. Other secondary verbs with flexible
negation word order are la 'come>DIRECTIONAL' and θwà
'go>DIRECTIONAL', among others.

Best,

Mathias

On 11 October 2012 09:55, Peter Arkadiev <peterarkadiev at yandex.ru> wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
>
> I would like to ask whether you know of any parallels to the following phenomenon in Lithuanian, where in the periphrastic perfect consisting of an auxiliary and a participle the negative prefix can attach to either of them (with very subtle semantic differences which should not concern us here), cf. (1a) and (1b) (both attested in natural texts)
>
> (1a) ne-su skait-ęs šitos knygos
>        neg-aux.prs.1sg read-part that book
> (1b) esu ne-skait-ęs šitos knygos
>        aux.prs.1sg neg-read-part that book
> 'I have not read this book'
>
> The question is actually twofold:
> 1) More specifically, do you know other examples of periphrastic perfects/resultatives which would show similar dual behaviour with respect to negation? And, on the other hand, I'd be grateful for explicit statements that in this or that language with periphrastic perfect such duality is not attested (as e.g. in English or in Bulgarian).
> 2) Less specifically, do you know other examples of periphrastic grams which would show similar dual behaviour with respect to scope-taking operators (not necessarily negation)? I am certainly aware of more or less common instances of similar kind with modal predicates, but what about other kinds of periphrastic grams?
>
> Thank you very much in advance and best wishes,
>
> Peter
>
> --
> Peter Arkadiev, PhD
> Institute of Slavic Studies
> Russian Academy of Sciences
> Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119334 Moscow
> peterarkadiev at yandex.ru
> http://www.inslav.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=279



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