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 47 as in Hausa, or after each, as in Japanese and Turkish. Correlative conjunction in English is thus somewhat atypical.) Languages may vary quite markedly in the types of constituents that they allow to be connected by means of coordinating conjunctions. In English, a very wide range of constituents may be connected in this way: nouns and noun phrases, verbs and verb phrases, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, clauses, etc. In a good many other languages, on the other hand, coordinating conjunc- tions (or at least those that are the translation equivalents of and) are used primarily, or exclusively, to connect nouns and noun phrases. This is true of Hausa and Japanese, for example (although these languages do have ways of expressing the semantic equivalent of verb phrase conjunction, etc. – see below). In this connection, it is interesting to note that in many languages ‘and’ and ‘with’ are expressed by the same word, as in the following Hausa and Japanese examples: (134) a. John da Bill sun zo John and Bill they.perf come ‘John and Bill came’ b. John ya zo da Bill John he.perf come with Bill ‘John came with Bill’ (135) a. John to Bill ga kita John and Bill subj came ‘John and Bill came’ b. John ga Bill to kita John subj Bill with came ‘John came with Bill’ If, as such examples suggest, the ‘and’ conjunction in these languages has developed historically from a prepositional or postpositional noun adjunct (cf. section 2.2), it is not surprising to find that it is used primarily for conjoining nominals. Let us now consider some of the alternatives to coordinating conjunctions that languages may use to express the semantic equivalent. One such alternative is simple concatenation of the conjuncts, as in the following examples of verb- phrase coordination from Akan and Hausa respectively: (136) Nnipa no dii nam nomm bia people the ate meat drank beer ‘The people ate meat and drank beer’ 48 Paul Schachter and Timothy Shopen (137) Audu ya tafi ofishinsa ya yi aiki Audu he.perf go office his he.perf do work ‘Audu went to his office and worked’ While such concatenative constructions are especially common for conjoining verbs and verb phrases, they are by no means restricted to this function. There are, for example, a good many languages that use concatenation for noun-phrase coordination as well, either as an alternative to coordinating conjunctions (as in Japanese and Turkish) or as the sole coordination strategy (as in Lahu – cf. Matisoff (1973)). Some other coordination strategies that do not involve conjunctions are illus- trated by the following examples, from Akan and Japanese respectively: (138) Y ε -ne w ɔ n abom bio we-be. with them have. united again ‘We and they have united again’ (139) John wa asa okite, kao o aratta John top morning getting. up face obj washed ‘John got up in the morning and washed his face’ Example (138) (taken from Christaller (1875)) involves the coordination of nominals. In this example the equivalent of and is expressed by the verb ne. The fact that ne is properly analysed as a verb is clear from the forms of the pronouns that precede and follow it: y ε - is a form which occurs elsewhere strictly as a subject pronoun prefixed to a verb, while w ɔ n is a form which occurs elsewhere strictly as an object pronoun following a verb. The sentence structure in (138) involves serial verbs – cf. Schachter (1974) – and may be compared with that of a sentence like: (140) Y ε -de w ɔ n aba we-take them have. come ‘We have brought them’ Example (139) (from Kuno (1973)) involves verb-phrase coordination, and is similar to the concatenative constructions cited above (e.g. (136–7)), except that the first verb in (139) is a dependent form, the gerundive okite ‘getting up’ (cf. okita ‘got up’). Let us turn now to the subordinating conjunctions. These are words that serve to integrate a subordinate clause into some larger construction. Like their coordinating counterparts, subordinating conjunctions may be prepositional or postpositional, with the prepositional type common in non-verb-final lan- guages, the postpositional type common in verb-final languages. The following |
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