Erkkilä, Riku

Helke, Jaakko

English

Helsingin yliopiston digitaalinen arkisto

Faculty of ArtsSYNCHRONY AND DIACHRONY IN KET INCORPORATIONSynchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation / Riku Erkkilä & Jaakko Helke 1Faculty of Arts• Verbal morphology is the most striking feature in Ket• Has been studied extensively (e. g. Georg 2007; Vajda 2003, 2004, 2015, 2017a, 2017b, 2020a; Werner 1997)• Previous studies have focused on morphosyntax and on semantics of single bases• Aims of this study• Study of the semantic roles of incorporates in Ket‒ What semantic roles do the incorporates express in general/with certain verbs• Reconstruction of meanings of semantically general Ket verb bases‒ Is it possible to asses the original meaning of semantically general Ket verb bases by using the knowledge of semantics of incorporates?Synchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation / Riku Erkkilä & Jaakko Helke 2BACKGROUNDFaculty of Arts• The last Yeniseian language• Other known Yeniseian languages are Yugh, Kott, Arin, Assan, and Pumpokol• Spoken by few dozen elderly speakers (Vajda 2015)• Traditionally spoken on the middle reaches of Yenisei River an its tributaries in Central Siberia• Typologically distinct from the neighboring languages• Tones, templatic verbal morphology, case and possessive clitics• Yeniseian languages have undergone typological accommodation to the neighboring languages (Vajda 2020b)Synchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation / Riku Erkkilä & Jaakko Helke 3KET LANGUAGEFaculty of Arts• Ket has templatic verb morphology• The template is a lexical property of the verb → different verbs use different positions• The same base can appear in different templates• Not all positions are used in a single verb• P0, P5, and P7 host lexical materialSynchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation / Riku Erkkilä & Jaakko Helke 4VERBAL MORPHOLOGY IN KETP8 P7 P6 P5 P4 P3 P2 P1 P0 P-1sbj person agrincorporate obj or sbj agrthematic consonant(s)3 anim agr + tense/mood portmanteau3 inan agrTAM 1, 2 sbj or obj agr or stat/res prefixbase anim pl sbj agrKet verbal template following Vajda (2020b). The slots are conventionally called P8‒P-1.Faculty of Arts Synchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation / Riku Erkkilä & Jaakko Helke 5THEORETICAL BACKGROUND• (Semantic) frame• Knowledge associated to a linguistic element by speakers• General information about an element (e. g. prototypical participant roles, information of aspectual properties etc. for a verb)• Information about typical usage contexts, as well as more speaker-specific associations• Causal chain model• Describes the participants of an event and their interactionFaculty of Arts• 500 first verbs exhibiting non-productive incorporation in Kotorova & Nefedov (2015b)• Meanings of bases and incorporates have been checked from Kotorova & Nefedov (2015a), Vajda & Zinn (2004), and Werner (2002)• Some elements did not have meaning in sources → meaning deduced from other elements• Incorporates were classified according to which semantic role they exhibit• Definitions from Croft (1991)Synchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation / Riku Erkkilä & Jaakko Helke 6DATARole Patient Result State Instrument(+ manner)Stimulus Direction Other TotalAll instances 38 238 8 47 30 136 3 500Action nominal 1 195 3 3 28 2 0 232Faculty of Arts Synchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation / Riku Erkkilä & Jaakko Helke 7SEMANTIC ROLES (SEMANTICALLY SPECIFIC BASES)Faculty of Arts Synchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation / Riku Erkkilä & Jaakko Helke 8SEMANTIC ROLES (SEMANTICALLY GENERAL BASES)Faculty of Arts• Three meanings• aq I ‘marker of single active action in some verbs’, aq II ‘go (once)’, (aq III ‘rot, decay’)• Frame of aq I includes a volitional AGENT, a PATIENT, and an action with a RESULT and possibly a DIRECTION• Frame of aq II includes a volitional AGENT, and a DIRECTION• The semantic chain of both include a volitional AGENT and a RESULT• DIRECTION equals RESULT in a coerced causal chain (Croft 1991)• The extension of meaning can be described as ’(volitionally) go to one direction’ > ’volitionally do an action with a direction-component’ > ’do a single active action’Synchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation / Riku Erkkilä & Jaakko Helke 9RECONSTRUCTING THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF BASESFaculty of Arts• Incorporates in unproductive incorporation in Ket express inanimate semantic roles• Middle and end sections of causal chain• Most typical roles are result and direction, instrument, stimulus, and patient are less frequent• What semantic roles the incorporate exhibit can be infered from the meaning of the base• Property of the frame of each verb• By comparing present-day meanings of verbs and semantic roles of their incorporates it is possible to reconstruct a frame and a putative meaning for an older form of the verbSynchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation / Riku Erkkilä & Jaakko Helke 10CONCLUSIONSFaculty of ArtsCroft, William 1991: Syntactic categroies and grammatical relations. The cognitive organization of information. Chicago: University of Chicago press.Georg, Stefan 2007: A descriptive grammar of Ket. Part 1. Introduction, phonology and morphology. Folkstone: Global Oriental.Kotorova, Elizaveta and Andrey Nefedov 2015a: Comprehensive dictionary of Ket. Vol I. München: Lincom Europa.Kotorova, Elizaveta and Andrey Nefedov 2015b: Comprehensive dictionary of Ket. Vol II. München: Lincom Europa.Vajda, Edward 2003: Ket verb structure in typological perspective. – STUF 56, p. 55–92.Vajda, Edward 2004: Ket. Munich: Lincom Europa.Vajda, Edward 2015: Valency properties of Ket verbal clause. In Malchukov, Andrej and Bernard Comrie (eds.) Valency classes of the world's languages. Volume 1. Introducing the framework, and case studies from Africa and Eurasia, p. 629–668. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Vajda, Edvard 2017a: Typology of Ket finite verb. – Studia Uralo-Altaica 51, p. 9–37.Vajda, Edward 2017b: Polysynthesis in Ket. In Michael Fortescue, Marianne Mithun and Nicholas Evans (eds.) The Oxford handbook of polysynthesis. 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199683208.013.49. Oxford: Oxford university press.Vajda, Edward 2020a: Ket polysynthesis, grammaticalization, and lexicalization. In Janet Zhiqun Xing (ed.) A typological approach to grammaticalization and lexicalization, p. 257–282. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Vajda, Edward 2020b: Typological accommodation in Central Siberia. In Tom Güldemann, Patrick McConvell and Richard Rhodes (eds.) The language of hunter-gatherers, p. 465–498. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Vajda, E. and M. Zinn 2004: Morphological dictionary of Ket (southern dialect). Tomsk: Tomsk state pedagogical university.Werner, Heinrich 1997: Die ketische Sprache. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Werner, Heinrich 2002: Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Jenissej-Sprachen. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Synchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation / Riku Erkkilä & Jaakko Helke 11REFERENCES

Synchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation

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Synchrony and diachrony in Ket incorporation

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