[Lingtyp] Query: 'Deceased referent' markers
Dan I Slobin
slobin at berkeley.edu
Thu Sep 26 21:41:25 UTC 2024
In English we have a grammatical usage that seems to be the flip side of a
“deceased referent marker.” Perhaps it can be called “a living individual
referent marker.” As Jim McCawley pointed out about fifty years, with
regard to uses of the English Present Perfect, one cannot say “Albert
Einstein has lived in Princeton” because Einstein is dead. This is due to
the restriction of the Pres Perf “to indicate that a state of affairs
prevailed throughout some interval stretching from the past into the
present.”
This usage seems to be evident to English-speaking children. When my son
was eight I asked him if you could say, “Abraham Lincoln has lived in the
White House.” He immediately said “no.” I asked him why not and he
answered: “Abraham Lincoln is dead.” We had never discussed this usage and
I was surprised that he was aware of it.
In 2017 Trump made a stir by saying: “Frederick Douglass is an example of
somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I
notice.” Douglass, the great 19th century African-American, died in 1895.
The press interpreted Trump’s use of the Present Perfect to indicate his
lack of knowledge of history. It was assumed that English speakers are
aware of the unstated restriction on the use of the tense/aspect form for
living referents.
The restriction also applies to individual non-humans. For example, I can’t
say: “My dog died last year. He *has roamed this neighborhood every day.”
For both types of referent markers, deceased and living, one must pay
grammatical attention to whether the referent is alive.
Dan Slobin
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Linguistics
University of California, Berkeley
On Thu, Sep 26, 2024 at 11:15 AM 양재영 via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
> Dear Michael Daniel,
>
> Unfortunately I am no expert in the language family, but upon your request
> I discovered some more mentions of this phenomenon in Hill & Hill (2019),
> where the suffixes ‑chui7v in Serrano, -ivy in Kitanemuk, and -k in
> Mountain Cahuilla (here labeled as 'DECedent') are all said to mark the
> death of a relative denoted by the kin term they are attached to.
> (The usage seems to be broader than just kin terms in Kitanemuk; see
> §12.3.6.)
> It is also claimed that this feature of 'kin terms as verbal forms' is an
> areal one, also found "in the Yuman languages that are spoken along the
> Colorado River, east of Takic."
>
> (Please kindly allow me to share your message so that my reply gets
> delivered to the OP and those who might find it useful.)
>
> Reference:
> Hill, Jane H. & Hill, Kenneth C. 2019. Comparative Takic Grammar. Survey
> of California and other Indian languages. University of California,
> Berkeley.
>
> Best regards,
> Jaeyeong Yang
>
>
> 2024년 9월 27일 (금) 오전 12:20, Michael Daniel <misha.daniel at gmail.com>님이 작성:
>
>> Dear colleague,
>>
>> together with my students, I am doing a reading course on the typology of
>> nominal tense.
>>
>> I think we do not have anything yet to read about nominal tense in
>> Uto-Aztecan. To tell the truth, I did not even know this family had nominal
>> tense - shame on me. Would you recommend a good paper dedicated to nominal
>> tense in this family or any of its languages? Maybe there is a glossed open
>> access corpus of a UA language with a considerable amount of occurrences of
>> nominal tense that we could use?
>>
>> Thank you in advance,
>>
>> Michael Daniel
>> --
>> Михаил Даниэль
>> *Я осуждаю агрессию моей страны против Украины.*
>> Michael Daniel
>> *I condemn my country's aggression in Ukraine.*
>>
>>
>> чт, 26 сент. 2024 г. в 13:07, 양재영 via Lingtyp <
>> lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>:
>>
>>> Dear Pattie Epps,
>>>
>>> Tübatulabal (Uto-Aztecan, California) uses a nominal ‘past tense’ suffix
>>> -pï- to mark the death of a person (including kins).
>>>
>>> The language also has a suffix -bai’i- that is used with a kinship term
>>> to indicate the kin being referred to is the last surviving one, and a few
>>> other interesting phenomena of expressing the death of the ‘connecting
>>> relative’.
>>>
>>> Reference:
>>> Voegelin, Charles F. 1935. Tübatulabal Grammar. University of California
>>> Press.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Jaeyeong Yang
>>>
>>> 2024년 9월 26일 (목) 오후 7:30, Pun Ho Lui via Lingtyp <
>>> lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>님이 작성:
>>>
>>>> Dear Pattie Epps,
>>>>
>>>> Narragansett (Algic) is claimed to have a suffix called “absentative”
>>>> which can encode a deceased person or lost possessions, e.g. nókac-i ‘my
>>>> late deceased mother’ (mother-ABSENTATIVE).
>>>>
>>>> Reference:
>>>>
>>>> O’Brien, Frank Waabu. 2009. Grammatical Studies in the Narragansett
>>>> Language (Second Edition). Aquidneck Indian Council.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Warmest,
>>>>
>>>> *Pun Ho Lui Joe*
>>>>
>>>> Epps, Patience L via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> 於
>>>> 2024年9月26日 下午6:14 寫道：
>>>>
>>>> Dear all,
>>>>
>>>> I'm writing regarding a phenomenon that appears to be widely attested
>>>> in Amazonian languages, which my project collaborators and I have been
>>>> calling a 'deceased referent marker'. We are wondering about the extent to
>>>> which a comparable phenomenon exists in other languages of the world - from
>>>> a preliminary survey, it appears to have very few close correlates
>>>> elsewhere.
>>>>
>>>> The Amazonian-type DRM construction involves using a particular
>>>> linguistic marker (which can usually be identified as more grammatical than
>>>> lexical, though it's not always an easy distinction to make) within the
>>>> noun phrase when making direct reference to a deceased referent. This is
>>>> reminiscent of what occurs in some European languages (e.g. English
>>>> *the late John, *Portuguese *o finado João*), but tends to be less
>>>> lexical and is ubiquitous in discourse, rather than being highly optional
>>>> and/or limited to more formal registers. In some languages, the DRM is a
>>>> distinct etymon with no other functions; in others, it overlaps with other
>>>> functions (most frequently that of a nominal past marker). It is always
>>>> used with humans (primarily proper names and kin terms), while some
>>>> languages also allow use with non-human referents. In spite of these
>>>> variations, there seem to be close parallels in how the construction is
>>>> formulated and how it is used discursively across many Amazonian languages.
>>>>
>>>> An example from Nadëb (Naduhup family, NW Brazil):
>>>> *ee makũuh ỹ haw'ëëh
>>>> doo paah*
>>>> father DRM 1sg raise
>>>> NMLZ PST
>>>> 'It was my late father who raised me (there).'
>>>>
>>>> In defining the Amazonian 'type' of DRM, we are focusing on resources
>>>> that a) consist of a morphological element (affix or clitic hosted by the
>>>> noun); or b) if arguably more lexical, have a ‘deceased referent’ function
>>>> that is relatively distinct from other meanings/morphosyntactic expressions
>>>> and/or appears ubiquitously in DRM contexts. We are excluding other kinds
>>>> of linguistic strategies for referring to the deceased, including naming
>>>> prohibitions, necronyms (passing on the deceased's name to a child), more
>>>> pragmatically optional periphrastic strategies (e.g. 'my dead relative',
>>>> 'my relative who died recently', etc.). We are also excluding (though we're
>>>> interested, for comparative purposes) other types of nominal morphology
>>>> relating to the deceased, e.g. a marker that occurs with a kin term X to
>>>> mean ‘one whose X has recently died’ in Kayardild (Australia):
>>>> *kangku-kurirr* (father’s.father-DEAD) ‘one whose father’s father has
>>>> recently died’ (Evans 1995: 197).
>>>>
>>>> We'd be very grateful for information about comparable phenomena in
>>>> languages outside South America.
>>>>
>>>> All best,
>>>> Pattie Epps
>>>>
>>>>
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--
*<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> *
*Dan I. Slobin *
*Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology and *
*Distinguished **Affiliated **Professor Emeritus of Linguistics*
*University of California, Berkeley*
*email: slobin at berkeley.edu <slobin at berkeley.edu>*
*https://danslobin.academia.edu/research
<https://danslobin.academia.edu/research>*
*https://archive.org/search?query=Slobin&sin=TXT
<https://archive.org/search?query=Slobin&sin=TXT>*
*address: 2323 Rose St., Berkeley, CA 94708, USA*
*<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> *
*I acknowledge that the UC-Berkeley campus is on the traditional, *
*ancestral, and unceded land of the Ohlone people. *
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