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Aspectual modulation and mirativity through light verbs: a constructional account| old_uid | 13002 |
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| title | Aspectual modulation and mirativity through light verbs: a constructional account |
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| start_date | 2017/03/24 |
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| schedule | 14h-17h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | In this paper, we present our Construction Grammar account of light verb constructions in the Indo-Aryan language Odia (earlier known as Oriya), spoken in the province Odisha, in the Eastern part of India (see Lemmens & Sahoo 2016, Sahoo & Lemmens, forthc., Lemmens & Sahoo, in prep.). As in related languages, such as Hindi/Urdu, light verb constructions are asymmetric complex verb predicates that combine a main (lexical) verb (MV) with a light verb (LV). While the LVs in these predicates are form-identical with a lexical verb in the language, they are often termed “light” because of their semantic and grammatical bleaching: they have lost their original lexical content as well their argument structure. The light verbs that we will consider here all express, as suggested by Butt & Lahiri (2001) and Butt & Geuder (2001) for the related language Urdu, some kind of “event modulation”, yet they have so far escaped a unified description. However, as we argue here, they do present a coherent system of constructions that serve as aspectual and/or mirative markers. Our constructional account posits that these LV constructions each have their particular syntactic and semantic properties. Their syntactic differences relate predominantly to different transitivity constraints. Semantically, they all modulate the interpretation of the event encoded by the main verb by adding a particular aspectual (phasal) profile on the event (i.e., profiling the ONSET , DURATION or COMPLETION of the event). Some of these light verbs (but not all) further add a mirative interpretation, i.e., they express that the event is unexpected or that is not supposed to have happened (for whatever reason). The present paper focuses mostly on this particular subset which could be termed “aspectuo-mirative LVs”. We will expand on what motivates the combination of the phasal and mirative interpretation of these LVs and how they can also differ with respect to the degree of mirativity they express. These differences can be related to features of transitivity, such as volitionality or control and affectedness (as contextually realised by the process size, impact, force, or scope). Our corpus-based analysis of Odia light verbs thus adds new and hitherto undescribed patterns to the study of mirativity; in addition, it presents evidence of the complex nature of this category. As we will show, such a constructional view allows an account of light verbs that is theoretically more coherent and descriptively more accurate. |
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| responsibles | Carlier |
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