Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
Parts-of-speech systems 43 exception to it. (That is, while Bambara is an SOV language in which the auxil- iary precedes the main verb, Greenberg’s generalization is irrelevant to Bambara since the auxiliary is uninflected in this language.) There is, however, one well- known systematic exception to Greenberg’s word order generalization, having to do with so-called verb-second languages, such as German. These are lan- guages which show SOV order in subordinate clauses, but in main clauses place a tense-bearing verb immediately after the initial constituent: cf. the position of the non-auxiliary verb hat ‘has’ in the following German examples: (119) a. Ich weiss, dass er zu viel Arbeit hat I know that he too much work has ‘I know that he has too much work’ b. Er hat zu viel Arbeit he has too much work ‘He has too much work’ c. Heute hat er zu viel Arbeit today has he too much work ‘Today he has too much work’ In such languages, auxiliaries follow the verb in subordinate clauses, thus conforming to Greenberg’s generalization. In main clauses, however, a tense- bearing auxiliary immediately follows the initial constituent and thus precedes the non-tense-bearing verb. Note the position of the auxiliary wird ‘will’ in the following examples: (120) a. Ich weiss, dass er zu viel Arbeit haben wird I know that he too much work have will ‘I know that he will have too much work’ b. Er wird zu viel Arbeit haben he will too much work have ‘He will have too much work’ c. Heute wird er zu viel Arbeit haben today will he too much work have ‘Today he will have too much work’ In languages that lack auxiliaries, the equivalent meanings are often expressed by verbal affixes. Some examples from Tagalog, all involving the verb base luto ‘cook’, are: magluluto ‘will cook’, nagluluto ‘is cooking’, nagluto ‘has cooked’, nakakapagluto ‘can cook’, niluto ‘was cooked’. It is also possible, of course, for a language that does have auxiliaries to have such verbal affixes as well. Thus English uses an auxiliary to express the future tense (will cook) and an affix to express the past tense (cooked). Negation, like the other categorizations that may be expressed by auxiliaries, may be expressed affixally (as in Akan n-k ɔ 44 Paul Schachter and Timothy Shopen (negative-go) ‘doesn’t go’ – cf. k ɔ ‘goes’), but is also very commonly expressed by a distinct parts-of-speech class of negators (cf. section 2.5, below). The second class of verb adjuncts to be discussed, the verbal particles, is a closed class of uninflected words that co-occur with certain verbs. Examples from English are the italicized words in: (121) John woke up, turned off the alarm, and switched the light on In some cases the verbal particles may have clearly distinguishable locative or directional meanings, for example: (122) John kept his head up/down John carried the package in/out In other cases, however, the particle forms an idiomatic lexical unit with the verb and does not carry any separable meaning: for example up in wake up, give up, hurry up; down in break down, calm down, write down. Some examples of particles from languages other than English (respectively, German, Akan, and Ga’anda – the last from Paul Newman (1971)) are: (123) a. Er stand sehr fr¨uh auf he stood very early on ‘He got up very early’ b. Er sah den Wagen an he saw the car at ‘He looked at the car’ (124) a. Kofi gyee Kwame so Kofi received Kwame on ‘Kofi answered Kwame’ b. Kofi daa Kwame ase Kofi lay Kwame under ‘Kofi thanked Kwame’ (125) a. ə s / ə nnda wan ə a in perf they. send medicine along ‘They sent medicine along’ b. Ni xiy pirsh ka ə I.fut buy horse away ‘I will sell a horse’ In some languages, some or all of the verbal particles also occur as (and are historically derived from) adpositions (see section 2.2). Thus English up and down and German auf and an also occur as prepositions, while Akan so and ase |
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