Jack Of All Trades: The Sri Lanka Malay Property Word (original) (raw)

The perfect construction and complexity drift in Sri Lankan Malay

Lingua, 2008

The verb morphosyntax of Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) differs strikingly from that found in other Malay varieties in that it has developed bound functional morphology as well as contrasts that are not present in related Indonesian varieties. Various types of functional prefixes and suffixes are now associated with the SLM verb which were not previously associated with Malay verbs, including tense and (non-)finiteness markers. The periphrastic perfect construction (1) is discussed and analyzed as biclausal, based on evidence from negation.The auxiliary aɖa can be negated, interrupting the adjacency of the verb and the auxiliary. Negation ordinarily precedes the lexical verb in the SLM verbal complex. The fact that a morphologically finite negation element is prefixed to the auxiliary in (1) supports a biclausal analysis of this construction. The construction does not add a semantic contrast, but compensates for the reanalysis of the free-standing perfect marker su as a bound tense affix.Some younger speakers are not using past or completive prefixation, and are reinterpreting aɖa (as -ɖa) as a suffix on the main verb, demonstrating that morphological simplicity or complexity in radical contact languages does not increase monodirectionally.

Lexical Anaphors and Pronouns in Selected South Asian Languages: A Principled Typology

Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2003

In this volume, we report new scholarship on fourteen South Asian languages, from four different language families, in a specific domain: the grammar of anaphora. This work was carried out and is represented here in terms of a unified framework that was designed to achieve cross-linguistic comparability. It was informed by one guiding principle: the convergence of two lines of investigation that are often kept distinct in linguistic inquiry today: linguistic theory, in a generative grammar framework, and linguistic typology. The former is focused on searching for explanations of the principles and parameters that underlie the cognitive competence for natural language and that are hypothesized to provide a "Universal Grammar" (UG), or underlying architecture, for all natural languages and for their learnability. The second line of investigation attempts to capture the "true facts" of cross-linguistic variation in the universal array of existent natural languages (cf. Comrie 1981). In our view, fruitful development of the science of linguistics depends on this integration (see, e.g., Subbarao-Saxena 1987a, 1987b; Subbarao 1998). That is, it requires a lively interchange between theory construction and the empirical challenge presented to it by the detailed investigation, in a principled manner, of the phenomena found in a wide variety of actual human languages. Without basic theory, the fundamental questions of the nature of the human competence for language cannot be addressed. However, in the absence of real language data, proposed answers may not be relevant to the real questions. The South Asian area is a particularly rich domain for this specific area of linguistic inquiry, as well as others. It includes several major families, of which four are represented by languages in this volume. In some cases, members of a single family are widely separated and in contact with members of others, resulting in various degrees of convergence. The existence of a South Asian linguistic area has been recognized for some time, beginning particularly with the pioneering work of Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1926, 1953), Jules Bloch (1934), and Murray Emeneau (1956), and work in that domain has been continued by other scholars (see, for example, Masica 1976, 1991 and the general account in Shapiro-Schiffman 1981). At the same time, there are significant differences and subareas, as the works in this volume clearly attest. South Asia thus represents a natural laboratory for the investigation of phenomena such as those

The grammatical life of property concepts in Malayalam

We provide an account of the morpho-syntax and semantics of property concept denoting expressions in Malayalam. We suggest that property concepts are lexicalized as uncategorized roots. Depending on the category of the functional heads they merge with, they participate in two types of predication. Both types are based on possession, overtly or covertly expressed. Our results add to recent work by Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2013) concerning variation in the lexicalization and grammar of property concepts cross-linguistically.