[Lingtyp] agent nominalization

[David Beck]

Hi, Eitan

My colleague Paulette Levy has suggested that the agentive nominalizer in Totonac languages comes from a combination of the antipassive/indefinite object marker and a nominalizer, e.g. Upper Necaxa Totonac

kuchú: ‘cure someone’
kuchu:nún ‘cure, heal (others)’ (by adding -nun ’suppressive antipassive’)
kuchu:nú’ ‘doctor, healer’ (by adding -ʔ ’nominalizer’)

The last step removes the final -n of the antipassive and, in Upper Necaxa, the glottal stop reduces to laryngealization of the final vowel (to the extent that you can tell the difference between V’ and Vʔ). The second and third steps are diachronic, and the combination -nun + -ʔ is throughly grammaticized (as evidenced by the fact that stress doesn’t move leftward, as it does in other nominaliations formed by -ʔ). Some evidence behind this analysis is that in languages like Upper Necaxa where the antipassive/indefinite object marker undergoes vowel harmony, the agentive does as well, but it doesn’t in languages where the antipassive doesn’t show harmony (harmony is limited and morphophonemically-conditioned in Totonac). 

David

> On Jan 6, 2016, at 3:07 AM, Eitan Grossman <eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I am writing to ask a question about 'agent'* nominalizations across languages. I am interested in agent nominalizers that do or don't have known diachronic sources, in the attempt to understand which diachronic pathways are attested (and hopefully, their relative frequency/rarity). For example, some languages have:
> 
> (a) bound morphemes whose diachronic source is clearly identifiable, whether lexical (Japanese -nin or -sya 'person; Khwe and Meskwaki are similar, or Japanese -te 'hand') or grammatical (Serbo-Croatian -l(o) from an original instrumental meaning, perhaps similarly for Afroasiatic m-).
> (b) bound morphemes whose diachronic source may be mysterious or reconstructible as such to the proto-language (Quechuan -q?, Malay-Indonesian peng-/pe-?).
> (c) free morphemes whose diachronic source is clearly identifiable (Ponoapean olen ''man of')
> (d) more complex constructions involving the reduction of modifier clauses of some sort (Coptic ref- < ultimately from 'person who verbs')
> (e) rarer morphosyntactic alternations, like reduplication of the initial syllable (Hadze, Serer), vowel length (Akan), vowel raising (+breathiness) (Nuer) 
> (f) no such nominalizer mentioned, or explicitly mentioned that there is no dedicated agent noun construction. In some languages, ad hoc formation via relatives is the only (Tlapanec), main, or a supplementary strategy (e.g., Indonesian relativizer yang).
> (g) zero conversion
> 
> There is nice paper by Luschuetzky & Rainer in STUF 2011, but it deals almost exclusively with affixes and only rarely mentions diachronic information.
> 
> From a very preliminary survey of grammars, it looks like the origin of agent nominalizers is often pretty obscure, and the shortest and most bound morphemes look to be very old, quite expectedly. Identifiable lexical sources seem to converge around 'person, thing' or body parts. Reduction of complex constructions to an affix seems to be rare but attested. 
> 
> So, here's the question: in your languages, is the diachronic source of agent nominalizers identifiable?  I'd be grateful for any information you might be willing to share!
> 
> Best,
> Eitan
> 
> *Disclaimer: even though this is a common term, most languages I've seen don't single out the semantic role of agent, and this is often noted in theoretical discussions. Also, such nominalizations don't have to be derivational or even 'morphological.'
> 
> 
> 
> Eitan Grossman
> Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences
> Hebrew University of Jerusalem
> Tel: +972 2 588 3809
> Fax: +972 2 588 1224
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