verificative

[Plank]

Dear Misha, Timur, et al.,

its author isn't on the ball today, which must mean he is vacationing in some out of the way place (such as the hinterland of Debrecen);  so on his behalf let me draw your attention to an article that is forthcoming in LT 17(2) 2013 (to come out before ALT 10), introducing LT's new feature "What exactly is ...?":

Vincent, Nigel. 2013. Conative. LT 17. 269-289.

In his survey of grammaticalised forms/constructions for expressing (unsuccessfully) attempted rather than completed actions, Nigel (p178) also mentions periphrastic constructions with 'see', widespread in Papuan languages (source:  Foley 1986: 152).

Further down on that page we meet the Burmese "experimentative", and so on.

If you have sufficient evidence for a separate "verificative", do write it up!  We don't want "What exactly is ...?" to end up instantiating a conative, tentative, frustrative or some such undesirable notion.

Frans


On Jul 29, 2013, at 5:20 PM, Claude Hagége <claude-hagege at WANADOO.FR> wrote:

> Dear Michael and Timur,
>  
>                The Lezgic verificative you mention is fairly particular, since it illustrates a clear grammaticalisation process, as shown 1) by the attrition of Archi ak:u ”see” into -k:u- in your first example; 2) by the insertion of -k:u-  and Agul –čuk’- into the verbal complex, which can be considered as a proof of their treatment as parts of the morphology of these Lezgic languages.
>                This the reason why I am not sure that French voir cited by Alec and Mandarin看 kàn cited by André correspond to the same phenomenon, let alone that 看 does not mean “see” but “look at”; it takes the resultative meaning  “see” only when suffixed by 见 jiàn, yielding 看见 kànjiàn, just as another perception verb, 听 tīng“listen to”,  yields, when suffixed by the same  见 jiàn element, a compound verb 听见tīngjiàn “hear”. Muhammad’s Pashto example exhibits a verb gorəm ”I see” (by the way, Osmanli and Azeri Turkish, another family, have gör(mek) and gör(mək)respectively “to see”!), which is simply the normal lexical use of a verb, in a special meaning.
> The Vanuatu Oceanic examples cited by Alec seem closer to the Lezgic phenomena, since one of them represents the last step of a grammaticalisation process.
> One can also mention a certain use of Japanese miru “to see” in such sentences as行ってみましよう i(k)-tte mi-ma(s)-yoo  (go-CONVERB  see-POLITENESS-EXHORTATIVE) “let’s go” (with an implication that there is something to be seen). The use of the -te  converbal form here in association with the verb mi(ru) “see” may be considered as a syntactic, rather than morphological, phenomenon. But what it expresses is in fact a tentative meaning. I would therefore characterize these uses of Chinese kàn, French voiror Japanese mi(ru) as tentative uses. I propose calling tentative this kind of expression. However, this is not exactly the same as the Lezgic morphemes cited by Michael and Timur, because they don’t have a tentative, but a verificative meaning. To that extent, these Lezgig facts remain particular.
>  
> All best.
>  
> Claude Hagège
>  
>  

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