Meaning in linguistic forms

6.5.2Framing events through verbal morphology

Verbal morphology has also been studied a great deal by grammarians, especially in the areas of person, number, tense/aspect marking, and causation. Language typologists know that whereas one language may change verbs for conveying different ways in which a given action is performed or distributed through time, another language may prefer to maintain the same verb root and either add different morphemes to convey different meanings (see examples above from Pohnpeian) or simply rely on the linguistic and/or extralinguistic context for differentiating. Thus, English verbs referring to death typically distinguish between a causative and a noncausative meaning: kill (causative)19 vs. die (non-causative). On the other hand, “almost all English verbs expressing the material disruption of an object – e.g.break, crack, snap, burst, bust, smash, shatter, shred, rip, tear – apply equally in both noncausative and causative cases (The balloon burst/I burst the balloon)” (Talmy 1985: 84). In some languages, the same distinction may be represented either by adding a morpheme to convey the meaning of causation or by adding a morpheme to specify the non-causative use. In Samoan, the first option is common. A causative verb is often derived from a non-causative one by adding the prefix fa`a- ([faʔa]), as shown

–

in (29) and (30) below: pa`û “fall” becomes fa`a-pa`u “drop” (or “Cause-fall”).20

(29)	`ua	–	le	tama
		pa`u
	Pst	fall	Art	boy
	“The boy has fallen (down)”
(30)	`ua		–	e	le	tama	le	ipu
		fa`apa`u
	Pst	Caus-fall		Erg	Art	boy	Art	dish
	“The boy has dropped the dish”

In Spanish, the reverse is done by adding a “reflexive” morpheme, se, to the causative verb to make it into a non-causative one, as shown below (from Talmy 1985: 85):

(31)Abrió la puerta opened the door “(he/she) opened the door”

19Causative verbs are those verbs that describe events involving an agent whose actions bring about a certain change of state in some entity. Typical examples of causative verbs are kill, open, break, drop, buy. In generative grammar, causative verbs are analyzed as containing an abstract semantic predicate “CAUSE” (capital letters are used to emphasize the abtract, non-lexical nature of the predicate). Thus, kill is represented as involving a semantico-logi- cal structure of the type CAUSE (x, BECOME (NOT (ALIVE (y)))). This type of analysis is meant to capture the inference y is not alive from x killed y. For a discussion of this and other formal treatments of causative verbs, see Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990: 350–70).

20The prefix fa`a- does not always carry the meaning of causation in Samoan. It can also be

–

used for producing manner adjectives and adverbs, as in fa`aSamoa “the Samoan way.”

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6.5 From morphology to the framing of events

(32) La	puerta	se	abrió
The	door	Refl	opened
“The door opened”

Native American languages are well known for their rich verb morphology that allows for subtle semantic distinctions, each of which may be traceable to a separated affix. It is such richness and the ways in which the different morphemes are combined in what appears as a single word that prompted in the past the label polysynthetic in referring to such languages in the context of language typology (Baker 1996). A good example of this type is represented by Atsugewi, a Hokan language of northern California, which has a vast array of morphemes that convey information about the path followed by an object in approaching a particular ground (see table 6.3).

Table 6.3 Subtle semantic distinctions conveyed by verb morphology in Atwugewi (from Talmy 1985: 108–9)

’			“into a liquid”
-ict
-cis			“into a fire”
-isp -u· +			“into an aggregate” (e.g. bushes, a crowd, a rib-cage)
-wam			“down into a gravitic container” (e.g. a basket, a cupped hand, a
			pocket, a lake basin)
-wamm			“into an areal enclosure” (e.g. a corral, a field, the area occupied by
			a pool of water)
-ipsnu +			“(horizontally) into a volume enclosure” (e.g. a house, an oven, a
			crevice, a deer’s stomach)
-tip -u· +			“down into a (large) volume enclosure in the ground” (e.g. a cellar,
			a deer-trapping pit)
-ikn +			“over-the-rim into a volume enclosure” (e.g. a gopher hole, a mouth)
-ikc			“into a passageway so as to cause blockage” (e.g. in choking,
’			shutting, walling off)
	u	+	“into a corner” (e.g. a room corner, the wall–floor edge)
-iks
-mik·			“into the face/eye (or onto the head) of someone”
	’		“down into (or onto) the ground”
-mic
-cisu +			“down into (or onto) an object above the ground” (e.g. the top of a
’			tree stump)
			“horizontally into (or onto) an object above the ground” (e.g. the
-iks

side of a tree trunk)

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Meaning in linguistic forms

Verbal morphology and nominal morphology often interact in a language. For instance, ergativity (see above) is not always exclusively marked in the nominal morphology. There are languages in which it is the verb form, usually through pronominal infixes or agreement markers, that gives out information about which of the nominal arguments is the Agent and which is the Object (Absolutive). In Jacaltec, a Mayan language of Guatemala, the ergative-absolutive distinction is marked in the verb through infixes. The first infix identifies the Absolutive NP and the second infix identifies the Ergative NP. In (33) and (35), there are no independent NPs and therefore the meaning of the sentence must be recovered from the verb morphology alone, which displays information about case (ergative vs. absolutive) and number (first vs. second person) of the arguments of the predicate (hit):

(33)ch-oŋ-ha-maka ASP-us-you-hit

“you (sing.) hit us”

(Craig 1979: 31)

(34)ch-ach-cu-maka ASP-you-we-hit “we hit you (sing.)”

In Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo (Woodbury 1985), both the noun and the verb carry ergative-absolutive morphology, as shown in the following examples (in Eskimo languages, as in some other linguistic families, the ergative marker is the same as the marker for “possession,”21):

(35)Nukaq-Ø ner-’uq-Ø Nukaq-Abs eat-Indic-3sg

“Nukaq ate”
(36) Nuka-m	akutaq-Ø	ner-a -a
Nukaq-Erg	mixture-AbsSg	eat-Indic-3sg:3sg
“Nukaq ate the (berry) mixture”			(Woodbury 1985: 67)

These examples also suggest that, as argued by Hopper and Thompson (see below), transitivity is not a property of individual verbs, but of clauses. The same verb ner- “eat” acquires different morphology depending on whether there is an Object in the clause.

The close connection between nominal and verbal morphology is also shown

21To avoid confusion, I have replaced Woodbury’s gloss “REL” (relative case) with “Erg” (ergative), despite the fact that “relative” is probably a better general category for Eskimo languages. The colons (:) indicate an additional meaning of the same morpheme.

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6.5 From morphology to the framing of events

by a verbal grammatical continuum similar to the hierarchy of features discussed by Silverstein and others for nominal morphology. Moravcsik (1974), reviewing agreement phenomena in a number of languages, discovered that certain types of referents were more likely than others to require agreement in the verb. If in a language the verb agreed with only one type of argument, it would be the Subject (this is the case for Latin, see above). If the verb agreed with two types of arguments, it would be the Subject and the definite Object (this is often the case in Bantu languages, where an additional constraint for agreement might be that the Object be human). If the language agreed with three types of arguments, they would be the Subject, the definite Object, and the indefinite Object.

6.5.3The topicality hierarchy

Givón (1976) proposed to recast these tendencies in terms of what he called a hierarchy of topicality, according to which one would predict the types of referents that are more likely to undergo or trigger grammatical rules such as verbal agreement. The term “topicality,” derived from “topic,” was used because it appeared that the items that are higher in the hierarchy are also the ones that are more likely to be talked about or be “topics.”

Figure 6.2 reproduces the topicality hierarchy as a set of distinct but interacting hierarchical relations:

a.HUMAN > NON-HUMAN

b.DEfiNITE > INDEfiNITE

c.MORE INVOLVED PARTICIPANT > LESS INVOLVED PARTICIPANT

d.1ST PERSON > 2ND PERSON > 3RD PERSON

Figure 6.2 Hierarchy of topicality

(Givón 1976: 152)

Despite some unresolved issues regarding the criteria by which to identify the topic in a sentence, the features in the topicality hierarchy have been found to be relevant to a number of morphological and syntactic processes in a variety of languages and this theory has thus continued to attract the interest of grammarians and fieldworkers committed to a discourse-oriented, functionalist account of why languages behave the way they do, that is, for instance, why they mark morphologically only certain types of categories and only in certain syntactic contexts.

Going back to the discussion of nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive languages, the distinction between the two can be captured by saying that some languages favor a categorization of participants in terms of their semantic role in the depicted event (ergative-absolutive languages), whereas other languages favor a categorization based on the tendency to present events from the point of

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