Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
Download 1.59 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
|
Parts-of-speech systems 41 are also cases – such as the Hausa examples cited below – where a synchronic analysis of auxiliaries as verbs seems questionable.) Auxiliaries are words that express the tense, aspect, mood, voice, or polarity of the verb with which they are associated: i.e., the same categorizations of the verb as may be expressed by means of affixes (cf. section 1.2). English examples of auxiliaries expressing tense, aspect, and mood (respectively, future, perfect, and conditional) are: (112) John will understand John has understood John would understand English also offers examples like the following of auxiliaries expressing voice (passive) and polarity (negative), in combination with tense: (113) John was understood John won’t understand Some representative examples from other languages are: Bambara (114) a. U ye a san they past.affirm it buy ‘They bought it’ b. U ma a san they past.neg it buy ‘They didn’t buy it’ c. U b ε a san they prog.affirm it buy ‘They are buying it’ d. U l ε a san they prog.neg it buy ‘They aren’t buying it’ Hausa (in this language a subject-pronoun morpheme and an auxiliary mor- pheme regularly combine to form a single word, the ordering of the two mor- phemes varying with the auxiliary used): (115) a. Za-ta tafi fut -she go ‘She will go’ b. Ta-kan tafi she-habit go ‘She goes’ 42 Paul Schachter and Timothy Shopen c. Ta-na tafiya she-prog going ‘She is going’ d. Ba-ta tafiya prog.neg -she going ‘She isn’t going’ And Kannada (examples from Upadhyaya and Krishnamurthy (1972)): (116) a. Baritta iddiini writing I.prog ‘I am writing’ b. Baritta irtiini writing I.prog.habit ‘I am writing’ In some languages sequences of two or more auxiliaries are allowed, in which case their order in relation to one another is generally fixed, as in the following examples from English and Tera (the latter from Newman (1970)): (117) John must have been sleeping (118) Ali k ə ka a nji z / u Ali sjnct habit distant eat meat ‘Ali should regularly eat meat (there)’ In other languages, such as Bambara (cf. (114)), only one auxiliary may occur in each clause. Greenberg (1963) has noted a correlation between the position of an inflected auxiliary in relation to the verb and other word order properties of the language. Stated in general terms, this correlation is to the effect that the position of an inflected auxiliary in relation to the verb will generally be the same as the position of the verb in relation to an object. Thus in languages where the verb precedes the object (e.g. English), an inflected auxiliary generally precedes the verb, while in languages where the verb follows the object (e.g. Kannada), an inflected auxiliary generally follows the verb. (Greenberg’s own generalization is somewhat narrower than this: namely, ‘In languages with dominant order vso, an inflected auxiliary always precedes the main verb. In languages with dom- inant order SOV, an inflected auxiliary always follows the main verb’ (p. 67). Greenberg thus does not propose a generalization about svo languages. The data that he cites, however, show that, in almost all cases, inflected auxiliaries precede the verb in svo, as in vso, languages.) It should be noted that Greenberg’s word order generalization applies only to inflected auxiliaries, so examples like those in (114) do not constitute an |
