Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
On verbal semantics and packaging options
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
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On verbal semantics and packaging options 1.1 Conceptual events, participants and perspective We saw above a number of examples in which the same conceptual event has been presented in formally different ways, but the concept of conceptual event itself remains vague and undefined. Developing some ideas from Grace (1987), we may define a conceptual event as a basic level semantic description of an event regardless of any real-world, speech-time instantiation of it. Thus, the English verb give labels a conceptual event of someone causing an object to go into the possession of someone else, and this description applies to any instantiation of this label: (6) (a) Fred gave a book to Samantha (b) Fred is giving Samantha a book (c) Samantha has been given a book by Fred (d) Will a book be given to Samantha by Fred? And this same basic description will apply to the Yimas verb ‘give’, although, of course, the label for the conceptual event will be different, ŋ a- ‘give’ (pn = proper noun; Roman numerals in Yimas glosses indicate gender classes): (7) Yakayapan buk na-n- ŋ a-r-akn Tamprak pn book.v.sg v.sg.p-3sg.a-give-perf-3sg.dat. pn ‘Yakayapan gave Tamprak a book’ Sometimes, the differences in expression of conceptual events may be greater than simply a change in the label. For example, English has a basic verb kill which describes a conceptual event of someone/something doing some action which results in someone else becoming dead: Jane killed Alex. Watam, another Papuan language of New Guinea, has no such verb; the conceptual event needs to expressed by a sequence of two verbs, one describing the causing action or event, which can be a general vague verb like mo- ‘do’ or a more specific one like ru ŋ - ‘hit’, and another describing the result of dying: A typology of information packaging 365 (8) Katewa Kas mo rugu-r minik-rin pn pn acc hit-dep die-past ‘Katewa killed Kas’ That ru ŋ - minik- (‘hit die’) ‘kill’ describes a unitary conceptual event in spite of its complex exponence is clear from that fact that (8) is a single clause; if we wanted two conceptual events with a cause–result relationship between them, a complex sentence with two clauses and an overt conjunction would be necessary: (9) Katewa Kas mo ru ŋ -tape ma minik-rin pn pn acc hit-conj 3sg die-past ‘Because Katewa hit Kas, she died’ As examples like these from Watam make clear, the lexicalisation of concep- tual events will vary quite widely from language to language (and even within a language: note eat versus have a feed). Ultimately, it is a function of the nature of a language’s verbal lexicon, for a language’s lexicalized verbs provide a systematic set of descriptions for states, events and actions, an inventory of basic conceptual events. Of course, the structures of verbal lexicons vary quite widely across the languages of the world, from many thousands of members for English, to around a hundred or so for Papuan languages like Yimas or Kalam (Pawley (1993)). Conceptual events, then, are those basic semantic descriptions of states, events or actions, be they of simple exponence, as in English, or complex, as in Papuan languages like Kalam, Watam or Yimas. A given event, then, can often be described in different ways across languages. Interestingly, even within a single language a similar phenomenon can occur; consider Fillmore’s (1977) famous example of describing a commercial scene, say Sam’s purchasing of a book from Jane. This can be described with different English verbs, each providing a different perspective on the event: (10) (a) Sam bought a book from Jane for $12 (b) Jane sold a book to Sam for $12 (c) Sam paid Jane $12 for a book (d) This book cost Sam $12 Download 1.59 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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