[Lingtyp] Publication announcement: Mermaid construction

[TasakuTsunoda]

Dear Martin,

   

    Thank you for your response.

    I am happy to hear that you think the term “mermaid construction” is beautiful and that you have found “mermaid construction” intriguing. These effects are exactly what I intended when I coined the term “mermaid constriction”.

 

    The back cover of the book states as follows.

 

==============================================================

This volume examines the unusual mermaid construction in eighteen languages of Asia and Africa. This construction looks biclausal superficially, but it is monoclausal syntactically. Its prototype has a compound predicate which contains an independent noun, and its predicate has a modal, evidential, aspectual, temporal, stylistic or discourse-related meaning. This volume shows how a noun may be reanalyzed to become a constituent of a predicate.

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    The book advertisement states as follows.

 

==============================================================

This volume provides detailed studies of the crosslinguistically unusual mermaid construction in seventeen languages of Asia, including Modern Standard Japanese, and one language of Africa. This construction appears to be absent in languages of Europe, Oceania and the Americas. The name — mermaid construction — alludes to its paradoxical make-up, where the structure closely resembling a verb-predicate clause ends with what may look like a noun-predicate clause. Superficially it looks biclausal; however, syntactically it is monoclausal. It has a compound predicate which contains an independent noun, a clitic or an affix derived from a noun, or a nominalizer. Its compound predicate has a modal, evidential, aspectual, temporal, stylistic or discourse-related meaning. The paradox is resolved from a diachronic perspective insofar as a biclausal structure is reanalyzed as a monoclausal one. This volume shows how a noun may be reanalyzed to become a constituent of a predicate. It constitutes an important contribution to research on grammaticalization and in particular, the grammaticalization of nouns and more generally, to the typology of syntactic reanalysis.

==============================================================

 

    I hope that these two texts will make you even more interested in this phenomenon and this book.

 

Best wishes,

 

Tasaku Tsunoda

 

送信元: Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
日付: 2020年9月9日水曜日 17:46
宛先: TasakuTsunoda <tasakutsunoda at nifty.com>
Cc: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
件名: Re: [Lingtyp] Publication announcement: Mermaid construction

 

Very intriguing! 

The beautiful term „mermaid construction“ reminds me of the older term „pied piper construction“. Can you briefly explain what it is?

 

Thanks,

Martin




Am 09.09.2020 um 08:40 schrieb TasakuTsunoda <tasakutsunoda at nifty.com>:

 

                                                                             2020/09/09

Dear Colleagues,

 

    I am happy to announce that the following book has been published.

 

Tsunoda, Tasaku (ed.). 2020. Mermaid construction: A compound-predicate construction with biclausal appearance. (Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics 6). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

 

　For information on this book, please see the following site: 

　　　https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/568273?tab_body=toc

 

  I add that the following book was published in 2018.

 

Tsunoda, Tasaku (ed.). 2018. Levels in clause linkage. (Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics 2). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

 

　　For information on this book, please see the following site: 

　　　https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/524272

 

Best wishes,

 

Tasaku Tsunoda

 

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