29.2009, Qs: Morphological Mismatch

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-2009. Thu May 10 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.2009, Qs: Morphological Mismatch

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Date: Thu, 10 May 2018 11:38:53
From: Matthew Juge [mattjuge at gmail.com]
Subject: Morphological Mismatch

 
I have been working for some time on situations where one grammatical category
seems to do the work of another. I call this phenomenon morphological mismatch
(Juge 2010). The type of example that got me thinking about this comes from
Spanish, where the imperfective/perfective distinction found in the past seems
to be encoded via the indicative/subjunctive contrast when the reference time
is in the future:

(1) 
Le-ía-n el artículo en ese momento.
read-PAST.IMPFV.IND-3P DEF.ART.M article at that moment
“They were reading the article at that moment.”

(2)
Le-ye-ron el artículo ayer.
read-PAST.PFV.IND-3P DEF.ART.M article yesterday
“They read the article yesterday.”

(3)
Me enoj-o cuando le-o el periódico.
1S.REFL anger-1S.PRES.IND when read-1S.PRES.IND DEF.ART.M newspaper
“I get angry when I read the newspaper.”

(4)
Te enoj-a-r-á-s cuando le-a-s este artículo.
2S.REFL anger-1S.FUT.IND when read-2S.PRES.SUBJ this article
“You’ll get angry when you read this article.”

I recently presented a paper (at KFLC) in which I laid out some of the
methodological obstacles to researching patterns of this type. Essentially it
boils down to the fact that grammars tend not to highlight some of these
complicated patterns, or at least not using the same terminology (whereas
paradigmatic irregularities like suppletion are usually clearly flagged). So,
I would like to ask if any of you know of similar cases of one grammatical
category doing the job of another. This can include some of the reasonably
well-known types like case and aspect marking doing some of the work performed
by definite markers in other languages or other, as yet unidentified cases. My
goal is to produce a monograph presenting the diachrony of enough cases  to
contribute to a typological perspective on these patterns.

Please send responses directly to me by email. I will post a summary if
interest warrants.

Many thanks in advance,
Matt Juge

Juge, Matthew L. 2010. Morphological mismatch and temporal reference in
interaction with lexical semantics in Spanish. Romance Philology 64. 209-221.
 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics
                     Morphology
                     Semantics
                     Syntax
                     Typology



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