Zúñiga, Fernando (2022). Predicative suffixation in Algonquian (Unpublished). In: 55th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Bucharest, Romania. 24-27 August, 2022.
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Some languages use predicative inflection constructions (Bertinetto et al. 2021) as an alternative to verbal and non-verbal copulas for the expression of proper inclusion (‘s/he is a teacher’) and identity predication (‘s/he is my teacher’). Such constructions have not received much attention in the comparative literature, but they occasionally appear in descriptions of languages of Africa, Australia, and the Americas.
The Algonquian languages of North America have a distinct brand of such constructions, which come in two main structural types. First, a non-verbal element may take a derivational suffix that creates an intransitive verb (-ini in (1a)), which can then be inflected like any other such verb in the language (1b) in order to work as a predicative expression of proper inclusion:
(1) Arapaho (Cowell & Moss 2008: 428, 31)
a. neeyéí3eibeihíí-ini-noo
IC\teacher-VBLZ:AI-1SG
‘I am a teacher.’
b. bééne-noo
drink.AI-1SG
‘I am drinking.’
Second, a non-verbal element may take a copulative suffix that creates a predicative expression of identity (-o’ka in (2a)) without turning its host into a bona fide verbal word like (2b), either as to its stem structure or regarding its inflectional potential:
(2) Blackfoot (Frantz 2009: 69; Frantz & Russell 2017: 251; glosses added)
a. am-wa-o’ka am-wa nit-ohkíímaan(-wa)
DEM-PROX-COP DEM-PROX 1-wife-PROX
‘That one is my wife.’
b. ii-sim-i-wa
PST-drink-AI-3SG.PROX
‘S/he drank.’
Such copulative suffixes may stand in a privative opposition to unmarked forms, like in (2), or participate in an equipollent opposition to non-predicative forms, like in (3):
(3) Menominee (Bloomfield 1962: 206; glosses added)
a. yo·-q n-e·k
DEM-PRED 1-house
‘This is my house.’
b. yo·-m ese·qta-w
DEM-NPRED act.so.AI-3
‘S/he does like this.’
Based upon extant descriptions of Algonquian languages, this paper surveys such affixes in the family, systematizing the main formal and functional regularities found. The study claims that the relevant parameters of variation of Algonquian predicative inflection constructions in particular, as well as of non-verbal predication constructions in general, include the following: the lexical vs. indexical status of the subject (i.e., whether it is a lexical NP or a personal/demonstrative pronoun), the syntactic status of the predicate (viz., whether it is an NP, a relative clause, a finite clause, etc.), and some features of the whole clause (e.g., polarity, tense-aspect-modality, and illocutionary force).
Item Type: |
Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
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Division/Institute: |
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of Linguistics |
UniBE Contributor: |
Zúñiga, Fernando |
Subjects: |
400 Language > 410 Linguistics 400 Language > 490 Other languages |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Fernando Zúñiga |
Date Deposited: |
12 Sep 2022 09:00 |
Last Modified: |
05 Dec 2022 16:23 |
Related URLs: |
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BORIS DOI: |
10.48350/172448 |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/172448 |
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