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Apprehensional morphology crosslinguistically: a preliminary account with a focus on the Amazon| old_uid | 14282 |
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| title | Apprehensional morphology crosslinguistically: a preliminary account with a focus on the Amazon |
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| start_date | 2017/09/08 |
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| schedule | 11h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | “Apprehensional morphology” subsumes any grammatical morpheme encoding "fear", fear being defined as "a judgement of undesirable possibility" (cf. Verstraete’s (2005) definition of the Apprehensive mood in the non-Pama-Nyungan languages). The goal of this presentation is to examine its crosslinguistic distribution and explore the typological profile of the mor-phemes across different geographic areas. For example, Ese Ejja (Takanan, Amazonian Bolivia and Peru) displays an exceptionally fine semantic granularity with three distinct apprehension-al morphemes (Vuillermet, To appear 2018): the Apprehensive mood marker in (1), the Avertive subordinator in (2), and the Timitive postposition in (3). (1) ’Biya ’biya ’biya ’biya! Kekwa-ka-chana miya! bee bee bee bee pierce-3A-APPREHENSIVE 2SG.ABS ‘Bee, bee, bee, bee! Watch out it might sting you! (2) Owaya ekowijji shijja-ka-ani [e-jja-saja-ki kwajejje]. 3ERG rifle clean-3A-PRS AVERTIVE-MID-block-MID AVERTIVE ‘He cleans his rifle [lest it get blocked].’ (3) Iñawewa kwaji~kwaji-ani ’biya=yajjajo. dog run~RDP-PRS bee=TIMITIVE ‘The dog is running for fear of the bees.’ While all three Ese Ejja morphemes encode fear, i.e. the undesirability and the (high) possi-bility of an event (or the undesirability of an entity from which one expects undesirable events), they differ in locus (verb vs. noun), syntactic scope (main verb vs. subordinate verb vs. nominal phrase) and perspective (that of the speaker vs. that of the main clause subject). Other languages have only one or two markers for similar functions: for instance, the appre-hensional morpheme fang in Marrithyiel (Western Daly; Australia; Green 1989) covers all three functions (1-3). Apart from Lichtenberk’s (1995) seminal paper, which includes data from 9 languages and establishes 4 functions (2 of which are encoded in Ese Ejja by distinct morphemes (illustrated in (1-2)), apprehensional morphology has been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. In the light of the functional typology established by Lichtenberk (1995) and Vuillermet (To appear 2018), my presentation will show that apprehensional morphology is a widespread phenomenon, attested in about 70 languages, and particularly frequent in Northern Australia and the Amazon, while virtually absent from the African Macro-Area (Hammarström & Donohue 2014). Using WALS-like maps, I will examine the crosslinguistic distribution of apprehensional morphology not only as a domain, but also function by function, to look for possible areal phenomena, focusing on South American languages. |
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| responsibles | Coupé |
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