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 53 (The placement of clitics in Tagalog is actually somewhat more complex than these examples suggest: see Schachter and Otanes (1972:429–35).) In other languages, clitics occupy a fixed position in relation to a verb. In French, for example, clitics immediately precede the verb that governs them, except that they follow an affirmative imperative. Note the position of the clitic y ‘there’ in the following French sentences: (165) a. Elle y reste aujourd’hui she there stays today ‘She is staying there today’ b. Il faut y rester aujourd’hui it is.necessary there to.stay today ‘It’s necessary to stay there today’ c. Restez- y aujourd’hui stay-there today ‘Stay there today’ In addition to having a fixed position in relation to other sentence elements, clitics also generally have a fixed, or partly fixed, position in relation to one another. Thus the three clitics in the French example in (166) must occur in the order shown, while the four in the Tagalog example in (167) allow the order variation shown, but no other: (166) Personne ne nous en donne no. one neg us some gives ‘No one gives us any’ (167) Nagtatrabaho ka na ba daw daw ba roon? are.working you now q they.say they.say q there ‘Do they say you are working there now?’ Since the class of clitics is positionally defined, it may cut across parts-of- speech classes that are defined on a functional basis. For example, the class of clitics in French includes the negator ne, the object and reflexive pronouns, y ‘there’, and en ‘from there, some, etc.’, and the class of clitics in Tagalog is even more heterogeneous, as is clear from examples such as (167) and (168): (168) Hindi pa man lamang tuloy siya nakakapagalmusal neg yet even just as.a.result he can.have.breakfast ‘As a result, he hasn’t even been able to have breakfast yet’ 54 Paul Schachter and Timothy Shopen Given this kind of heterogeneity, there is little of a systematic character that can be said about the types of elements that are likely to show clitic behaviour, and thus about the probable counterparts of these elements in other languages. It may be noted, however, that clitics are likely to be phonologically light words, rela- tively short and/or unstressed, and that, cross-linguistically, personal pronouns (which are usually phonologically light) seem to show more of a tendency to cliticize than any other single type of element. (For further discussion of clitics, with emphasis upon their differentiation from affixes, see Bickel and Nichols, in vol. iii, chapter 3, section 2.2.) Copulas are words used to indicate the relation between a subject and a predicate nominal or adjective. Many languages use a subset of verbs, the copulative verbs (see section 1.2), to indicate this relationship. This is true, for example, of English, which has copulative verbs like be, become, etc. In other languages, however, the copulas are clearly not verbs, and have quite distinct grammatical properties. In Hausa, for example, verbs precede their objects and are inflected for tense–aspect. Copulas, on the other hand, follow the predicate nominal and are uninflected except for gender, as in the following examples: (169) a. Ita yarinya ce she girl cop ‘She is a girl’ b. Shi yaro ne he boy cop ‘He is a boy’ ( Ce is the copula used with feminine singulars, ne the one used in all other cases.) In some languages a distinction is made between copulas and what may be called predicators. The latter are used to mark predicate nominals when there is no overt subject. In Bambara, for example, the predicator don is distinguished from the copulative verb ye: (170) Alamisadon don Thursday predicator ‘It’s Thursday’ (171) Bi ye Alamisadon ye today pres Thursday be ‘Today is Thursday’ In other languages, however, the same words predicate nominals with and with- out subjects. Compare the following Hausa example with (169): |
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