Non-lexical core-arguments in Basque, Romance and German: How (and why) Spanish syntax is shifting towards sentential head-marking and morphological cross-reference (original) (raw)
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This article deals with the ways in which non-lexical core arguments can be expressed in various languages. It tries to devise a typological hierarchy for the different types and endeavours to place Romance within this hierarchy. An analysis of Basque verbal markers as cross-reference morphemes introduces the subject with a language radically different from central IE. Using Nichols’ (1986 & 1992) typological differentiation between head-marking and dependent-marking languages as its basis, a typological sub-parameter of “clausal head-marking vs. clausal dependent-marking” is suggested which is shown to correspond to two radically different types of clausal co-reference: (1) agreement (concord) and (2) cross-reference. This terminology is then used to describe and explain an ongoing syntactic change in which Spanish object clitics have evolved into obligatory verbal markers closely resembling those of Basque. Their conventional analysis as “agreement markers” is questioned and Spanish is shown to be moving towards a clausal head-marking language in which all core-arguments of the sentence have to be expressed by verbal affixes, while nominal and pronominal argument realisations become mere appositions outside the sentence core. The traditional concept of an emerging new paradigm of “object conjugation” is rejected.
Basque is well known for its complex verbal morphology, where the in-flected verb, i.e. the predicate core, shows agreement with up to three ar-guments (ergative, absolutive, and indirect object). This entails that the syntactic relations between the central participants and the situation core are perfectly reflected in verbal and nominal morphology, by both agree-ment and case. The Basque agreement pattern illustrates the syntactic hier-archy between the central participants in different argument constellations. The argument slots on the top allow of most variation. For those at the end, possible candidates are restricted to third person. Auxiliaries correspond-ing to uncommon argument-constellations fall gradually out of use. As a consequence of the obsolescence of verbal morphology, new strategies for the expression of syntactic relations (and semantic content) emerge. The evolutions illustrated in this paper are symptoms of the typological shift from agglutinative to fusional morphology, and even beyond, as parts of the grammar have entered what may be called “the post-fusional stage”. The influence of Romance contributes to the obsolescence as well as the preservation of morphologically complex forms.
Basque is well known for its complex verbal morphology, where the inflected verb, i.e. the predicate core, shows agreement with (or represents) up to three arguments, namely ergative, absolutive, and dative marked noun phrases. This entails that the syntactic relations between the core arguments and the verb complex are perfectly reflected in verbal and nominal morphology, by both head- and dependent marking. Moreover, Basque predicates indicate tense (present, past, hypothetical), mood (indicative vs. subjunctive) and realis vs. irrealis. This leads to a large number of possible forms, with a high degree of morpholological irregularity. While the replacement of finite lexical verbs by complex predicates involving auxiliaries is well documented, the gradual obsolescence of many auxiliary forms is an ongoing and less noted phenomenon. The Basque agreement pattern illustrates the syntactic hierarchy between the core arguments in different argument constellations. The argument at the top of the syntactic hierarchy, i.e. the subject, allows of most variation. Head-marking cross-referencing arguments further down on the hierarchy is increasingly restricted, so that in some cases only third person dependents can be cross-referenced. Basque thus exhibits both the Monotransitive and the Ditransitive Person-Role Constraint, albeit to different degrees. Auxiliaries corresponding to uncommon argument constellations fall gradually out of use. Frequency is therefore not only responsible for grammaticalization, but also for the subsequent disintegration of paradigms according to the Rarity Condition on Obsolescence. As a consequence of the obsolescence of verbal morphology, new strategies for the expression of syntactic relations (and semantic content) emerge. The evolution illustrated in this paper is a symptom of the typological shift from agglutinative to fusional morphology and beyond, and suggests that a very high degree of synthesis is incompatible with a high degree of fusion. In addition to language-internal factors, the influence of Romance contributes to the obsolescence as well as the preservation of morphologically complex forms.
Grammatical relations in Basque
Argument Selectors, 2019
Basque is a language without known surviving relatives spoken by some 700,000 people in the Basque Country (Araba, Biscay, Gipuzkoa and Navarre in northeastern Spain, and Labourd, Low Navarre and Soule in southeastern France), in addition to some small Basquespeaking communities found in the Americas. It is used by bilingual speakers of all ages, but the highest percentages and/or numbers of speakers are found mainly in non-metropolitan areas of Biscay, Gipuzkoa, and Navarre. There are several regional varieties and a standardized form (euskara batua), which is the one addressed in this study. Basque morphology is largely agglutinative, i.e., it is predominantly concatenative and of separative exponence (except in the person-number inflection of verbs), with some flexivity (i.e., the allomorphy found in inflectional phenomena is not purely phonological) in both the verbal and nominal domains. Basque clauses show double-marking patterns and pragmatically conditioned deviations from the default SOV constituent order. The present paper surveys the argument selectors found in different areas of Basque grammar. Overt coding selectors are presented in Section 2 (with 2.1 covering the relatively straightforward dependent-marking patterns and 2.2 addressing the comparatively convoluted head-marking ones). Section 3 surveys behavioral selectors involving coreference (adverbial clauses, as well as control and raising phenomena), while Section 4 deals with other behavioral selectors (relativization sites, focus constructions, and subject of imperatives, with 1 The second author has conducted her part of this work thanks to support by the following funding schemes / research projects: Bas&Be FF2011-26906, from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), AThEME-Advancing the European Multilingual Experience (EC FP7/SSH-2013-1 AThEME (613465)), from the European Commission, and The Bilingual Mind (IT665-13), from the Basque Government. The authors are indebted to Jon Ortiz de Urbina for his help with some of the data, for the references to several studies mentioned here, and for his valuable comments on a previous version of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply. 2 some comments on Basque voice). The conclusions presented in Section 5 characterize Basque as a showing a complex picture regarding grammatical relations. From the perspective of Chomskyan linguistics, unproblematic notions like subject, direct object, and indirect object are instantiated in quite intricate ways, especially by the verb morphology, which makes for an interesting kaleidoscope of coding details related to both the lexicon and the grammar of the language. From the perspective of functionalist-typological linguistics, highly problematic notions like subject and object are shown to be particularly tricky in Basque morphology, but much less so in Basque syntax. 2. Overt coding selectors 2.1 Dependent marking When overt, the NP expressing the single argument of a monovalent verb of simple clauses (S) is most often found in the unmarked absolutive case. In (1), for instance, the S of the verb hil 'die', i.e. gizona 'the man', appears unmarked: (1) Gizon-a hil d-a. man-DET[ABS] die.PFV TAM-TAM 'The man has died.' This is certainly so with patientive monovalent verbs ("unaccusatives"), which align with motion and posture verbs. Agentive monovalent verbs ("unergatives"), by contrast, show some variation regarding how the nonstandard varieties treat them-roughly, their S tends to appear in the absolutive in the east and in the ergative in the west. 2 In Standard Basque, some monovalent verbs like irakin 'boil' have their S appear in the ergative (an "extended ergative" according to Dixon 1979; cf. Ortiz de Urbina 1989): (2) Ura-k irakin d-u. water-ERG boil.PFV TAM-have 'The water has boiled.' Bivalent predicates come in three guises. The ergative-absolutive pattern can be illustrated with ikusi 'see'; the agentive argument (A) takes ergative case marking (-k) while the patientive argument (P) appears in the unmarked absolutive: (3) (Ni-k) (zu) ikusi z-a-it-u-t. 1SG-ERG 2SG[ABS] see.PFV 2.I-TAM-PL-have-1SG.II 'I have seen you (SG).' The absolutive-dative pattern, on the other hand, can be illustrated with gustatu 'please'; the experiencer A bears dative case and the stimulus P is unmarked: (4) (Ni-ri) ardo-a gustatzen z-a-it .
Specificity and object marking: The case of Spanish a
Proceedings of the workshop" Semantic and …, 2003
* I am grateful to the participants at the workshop "Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Specificity in Romance Languages" (Konstanz, October 2002) for useful comments, and to Vicky Escandell-Vidal and Olga Fernández-Soriano for helpful discussion on an earlier draft. Thanks also to Begoña Vicente for patiently correcting my English. All remaining errors are exclusively mine. This research is supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología through a DGICYT project (PB98/0707 "Gramática e interpretación en la teoría de la relevancia"). 1 See Bossong (1997) and Aissen (2000) for an overview.
Amazonian Spanish, 2020
Direct object clitics in Spanish are morphological markers at the interface of syntax and phonology, morphology, semantics and information structure. We explore variability in direct object clitic doubling and argument marking in bilingual speakers of Shipibo-Spanish and Ashéninka-Perené-Spanish (Mayer & Sánchez, 2017b). We focus on the production of the dative versus the accusative forms of the clitic and on the expression of Differential Object Marking (DOM) (Aissen, 2003; Bossong, 1991; Dalrymple & Nikolaeva, 2011), in particular, on the extension of DOM to definite inanimate DPs and the lack of DOM with animate direct objects required in other varieties of Spanish. We analyze this variability as the coexistence of two different argument-marking systems in these contact varieties of Amazonian Spanish.