[Lingtyp] for-to infinitival

[Christian Lehmann]

Dear colleagues,

as so often, my question is terminological in nature. Let's presuppose 
the structure and function of the English /for ... to/ infinitival. The 
property that is of relevance to me is that it allows its subject to be 
represented. Now Cabecar has a very similar construction:

             Yís te ayë́́ kjuä́ tju̱-á̱ ijé yö́-n-a̱-klä.

1.sg erg book buy-pfv [3.ps form-mid-vsn-fin]

             ‘I bought the book for him to study.’

Like the English construction, it adds an operator - the suffix /-klä/ - 
to the plain infinitival - marked by the vacant subject nominalizer 
/-a̱/, which we could, to simplify the discussion, take to be an 
infinitive suffix. And the infinitival marked by /-klä/ differs from the 
plain infinitival exactly by not suppressing the subject argument and 
involving no phoric control by any component of the superordinate 
clause. Its syntax is also comparable to the Portuguese inflected (or 
personal) infinitive of the kind /para ele estudar/ 'for him to study', 
/para estudarmos/ 'for us to study'.

What do we call the /-klä/ operator; and what do we call this 
infinitival? In most, though not all contexts, this infinitival 
indicates the purpose of the action of the superordinate clause. I had 
therefore considered calling it by the term of traditional grammar 
/final/ (suffix and infinitival). Now this way is not open to me because 
this grammar (like most grammars, I presume) needs the term /final/ to 
designate something (including a finite or non-finite clause) that goes 
at the end of a syntagma.

The term that comes to mind is /purposive/. I am reluctant to adopt it, 
for the following reasons:

1) This infinitival does not always have a purposive function, as in the 
following example:

Jé ó̱-r=mi̱  Juan wa̱ i aláklä wä́yu-ä-klä.

d.med do1-mid(ipfv)=pot [John dsp 3 woman cheat-vsn-fin]

             ‘It is possible that John cheats on his wife.’

(The diathesis of the non-finite construction is as if the transitive 
verb were in middle voice; DSP is a kind of agent postposition on 'John'.)

2) More generally, a term referring to the structure rather than to the 
function of the construction would be more useful. The decisive 
syntactic difference is that the infinitive marked by /-klä/, while 
rearranging the valency a bit, does not reduce it. Thus, contrasting 
with 'vacant-subject nominalizer', it could be called 
'valency-rearranging nominalizer'. Not very elegant, though; and 
'valency-rearranged infinitival' sounds even worse.

3) The word /purposive/ has never felt particularly elegant to me, in 
terms of standard derivational morphology [although I'm afraid that what 
reacts in me here is a Latin-speaker intuition rather than an 
English-speaker intuition].

If English grammarians call the construction a /for-to/ infinitive, then 
I might call the Cabecar construction a /-klä/ infinitive. This however, 
would imply a bankruptcy declaration of linguistic analysis and would, 
moreover, not solve the problem of the interlinear gloss for /-klä/.

Has anybody seen a good term for this kind of construction? Any help 
would be most welcome. Thanks in advance,
Christian
-- 

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Rudolfstr. 4
99092 Erfurt
Deutschland

Tel.: 	+49/361/2113417
E-Post: 	christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
Web: 	https://www.christianlehmann.eu
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