[Lingtyp] Indexes fossilizing

Thu Nov 30 15:46:22 UTC 2023

Or — in the spirit of Watkins’ Law, sort of — languages of Papua New Guinea where suppletive stems for verb ‘give’ originate from reanalyses/fossilisations (?) of recipient cross-reference affixes as stems, with the stem itself being originally zero, as in Amele:

ut-ec               3sg-inf                       'to give to him/her' 
ih-ec                2sg-inf                       'to give to you sg'
it-ec                 1sg-inf                       'to give to me'   
al-ec                2/3du-inf                  'to give to you/them two' 
il-ec                 1du-inf                      'to give to us two'  
ad-ec               2/3pl-inf                   'to give to you/them pl'  
                         ig-ec                1pl-inf                       'to give to us pl'  

See Bernard Comrie, Recipient person suppletion in the verb ‘give’ (In Language and life: Essays in memory of Kenneth L. Pike, ed. M. L. Wise et al, 2003)

> On 30. Nov 2023, at 16:01, Eitan Grossman <eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Isn't Watkin's Law relevant here?  --- "third person markers are reanalyzed as part of the verbal stem, giving thus rise to zero marking in the third person” (Bickel et al. 2015), a process that Watkins posited to account for the reanalysis of the 3SG ending -t as part of the verbal stem in the course of development from Proto-Iranian to Persian (Watkins 1962: 94). Eugen Hill has also written about this recently and substantially.
> 
> Eitan
> 
> Bickel, Balthasar, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Taras Zakharko & Giorgio Iemmolo. 2015.
> Exploring diachronic universals of agreement: Alignment patterns and zero marking across
> person categories. In Jürg Fleischer, Elisabeth Rieken & Paul Widmer (eds.), Agreement
> from a diachronic perspective, 29–52. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
> 
> Watkins, Calvert. 1962. Indo-European origins of the Celtic verb, Vol. 1: The sigmatic aorist.
> Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Eitan Grossman
> Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics
> Department of Linguistics
> Hebrew University of Jerusalem
> Tel: +972 2 588 3809
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 4:01 PM Nigel Vincent <nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk <mailto:nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk>> wrote:
>> A case that would seem to fit the bill is the distinction between aver(e) 'have as auxiliary' and gaver(e) 'have, possess' in some northern Italian dialects, where the initial g of the main verb is a fossilized locative clitic. Compare colloquial northern Italian where the same element still behaves as a clitic - hence ce l'ho 'I have it' and c'ho una macchina 'I have a car'. There's an excellent study of this by Sandra Paoli (in Italian)  -https://benjamins.com/catalog/rro.19004.pao
>> Best
>> Nigel
>> 
>> 
>> Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA MAE
>> Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
>> The University of Manchester
>> 
>> Linguistics & English Language
>> School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
>> The University of Manchester
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/researchers/nigel-vincent(f973a991-8ece-453e-abc5-3ca198c869dc).html
>> From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of Uni KN <frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de <mailto:frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de>>
>> Sent: 30 November 2023 2:19 PM
>> To: Siva Kalyan <sivakalyan.princeton at GMAIL.COM <mailto:sivakalyan.princeton at GMAIL.COM>>
>> Cc: LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org <mailto:LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
>> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Indexes fossilizing
>>  
>> Possibly German verb schwan-en 'to have a sense of foreboding’ is like Nahuatl:
>> e.g., mir schwant etwas/Unheil ‘to me (DAT) looms something/a disaster (NOM)’
>> 
>> It’s not related to Schwan ’swan’, but arguably to verb wahn-en/wähn-en 'to imagine (wrongly)’:
>> e.g., ich wähnte ihn glücklich/zuhause 'I (wrongly) imagined him happy/at home').
>> 
>> The initial s- of schwanen is (well, could be) the 3rd person singular neuter personal pronoun es fossilised,  and phonologically adapted to a consonantal onset, of the original verb, frequently used “impersonally” with a non-specific, vague indication of the stimulus of the sensation, as in:
>> (e)s wānet mir ... 'it seems to me (as if)’.
>> 
>> Or so the story goes, and it seems to me a more plausible story than one relating schwanen to myths about prophetic swans or to Humanist joking about having forebodings and smelling, with Latin olēre ’smell’ sound-related to olor ’swan’.  Nonetheless, Otto Behaghel (Zur Etymologie von SCHWANEN, 1913) didn't like it either, because he doubted that wähnen ever was an "impersonal" verb, with the stimulus rather than the experiencer as subject.
>> 
>> 
>> <beitrgezurgesc38halluoft.jpeg>
>> [archive.org]Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive [archive.org]
>> archive.org [archive.org]
>>  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://archive.org/details/beitrgezurgesc38halluoft/page/500/mode/2up?view=theater__;!!PDiH4ENfjr2_Jw!DKiECfDZZXe0JdsKh-v3yowq9bf-X9N1F6exXxdf5ixKYwtCSCwxtDYX9KDW-0oMplGBJ64y47nNNhm4lIDfP5ZNKf3MG0LyvD9lz5A$>Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive [archive.org] <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://archive.org/details/beitrgezurgesc38halluoft/page/500/mode/2up?view=theater__;!!PDiH4ENfjr2_Jw!DKiECfDZZXe0JdsKh-v3yowq9bf-X9N1F6exXxdf5ixKYwtCSCwxtDYX9KDW-0oMplGBJ64y47nNNhm4lIDfP5ZNKf3MG0LyvD9lz5A$>
>> archive.org [archive.org] <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://archive.org/details/beitrgezurgesc38halluoft/page/500/mode/2up?view=theater__;!!PDiH4ENfjr2_Jw!DKiECfDZZXe0JdsKh-v3yowq9bf-X9N1F6exXxdf5ixKYwtCSCwxtDYX9KDW-0oMplGBJ64y47nNNhm4lIDfP5ZNKf3MG0LyvD9lz5A$>
>> 
>> Let’s stick with Nahuatl, then, to be on the safe side.  It’s a hard life, the typologist’s who craves diachronic wisdom.  Mir schwant Unheil.
>> 
>> Frans  
>> 
>> 
>>> On 30. Nov 2023, at 13:11, Siva Kalyan <sivakalyan.princeton at GMAIL.COM <mailto:sivakalyan.princeton at GMAIL.COM>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> If this phenomenon does exist, I suspect the most likely source construction would be “impersonal” argument indexes, such as Classical Nāhuatl tla- (e.g. ihtoa ‘say’ > tlahtoa ‘speak’); see https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tla [nahuatl.wired-humanities.org] <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tla__;!!PDiH4ENfjr2_Jw!DKiECfDZZXe0JdsKh-v3yowq9bf-X9N1F6exXxdf5ixKYwtCSCwxtDYX9KDW-0oMplGBJ64y47nNNhm4lIDfP5ZNKf3MG0LykkuGoSg$> for examples and references.
>>> 
>>> Siva
>>> 
>>>> On 30 Nov 2023, at 9:29 pm, Juergen Bohnemeyer <jb77 at buffalo.edu <mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Dear all – I’m passing along the following query from one of my advisees, Jose Antonio Jodar Sánchez:
>>>>  
>>>> “I have been looking for references which talk about pronominal affixes on verbs which have become fossilized and are now part of the verb root. I checked Anna Siewierska’s book on person but I could not find anything. Do you know of any?”
>>>>  
>>>> Presumably, what Jose Antonio’s is looking for is above all citable treatments. However, if the phenomenon hasn’t been dealt with exhaustively (which it may not), I’m sure examples will be helpful as well.
>>>>  
>>>> Thanks! – Juergen
>>>>  
>>>> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
>>>> Professor, Department of Linguistics
>>>> University at Buffalo 
>>>> 
>>>> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
>>>> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260 
>>>> Phone: (716) 645 0127 
>>>> Fax: (716) 645 3825
>>>> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu <mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>
>>>> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/ [acsu.buffalo.edu] <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/*jb77/__;fg!!PDiH4ENfjr2_Jw!DKiECfDZZXe0JdsKh-v3yowq9bf-X9N1F6exXxdf5ixKYwtCSCwxtDYX9KDW-0oMplGBJ64y47nNNhm4lIDfP5ZNKf3MG0Lyzv6zB1c$> 
>>>> 
>>>> Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh) 
>>>> 
>>>> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In 
>>>> (Leonard Cohen)  
>>>> -- 
>>>>  
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