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LAGB Annual General Meeting 2025

Henry Sweet Lecture – Miriam Butt

(1) a.

nadya=ne    xat      lɪk^h  di-ya

Nadya.F=Erg  letter.M.Nom  write  give-Perf.M.Sg

‘Nadya wrote a letter (completely).’  (Urdu / Hindi)

(1) b. 

rɑm   bɑg^h-ṭɑ-ke   mer-e p^hel-l-o

Ram.Nom tiger-Cl-Acc hit-Gd  throw-Past-3

‘Ram killed the tiger.’  (Bengali)

This was and is a rather startling claim that ran counter to much of thinking in the grammaticalizationliterature (e.g., Hopper and Traugott (1993), Bybee et al. (1994), Hook (1991, 2001)). However, there isa set of supporting evidence. For example, the modern Indo-Aryan morphological causative is not muchdifferent from how it was over 2000 years ago (Butt 2003, Jamison 1976, Speijer 1886) and Davison (2014)notes that the complex predicate permissive with ‘give’ also already appears to have existed in Old Indo-Aryan. Beyond Indo-Aryan, there is crosslinguistic evidence that light verbs indeed tend to be historicallystable (cf. Bowern 2008, Brinton and Akimoto 1999, Iglesias-R´abade 2001).

More recently, Slade (2013) and Ittz´es (2022) as well as Peter Hook (p.c.) have taken issue withButt&Lahiri’s claim as to the historical pertinacity of light verbs. In this talk, we go through these newerclaims and data in some detail and show that Butt&Lahiri’s claim as to the pertinacity of light verbs not onlyholds up, but is confirmed by the data adduced in both Slade (2013) and Ittz´es (2022).

Slade (2013) concentrates on examining evidence for grammaticalization from verbs that he assumes tobe light verbs. However, a close look at the data shows that Slade does not carefully distinguish betweenlight verbs, modals and auxiliaries (cf. Butt 2010) and that all of the examples adduced seem to either involvean auxiliary developing from a main verb (e.g., progressive rAh from ‘stay/remain’, cf. Bybee et al. 1994 forinstances of this well-established type of change) or modals (e.g., sAk ‘can/be able to’). We show that oncethis analytical confusion is sorted through, the data does not run counter to Butt&Lahiri’s claim.

Ittz´es (2022) looks at Sanskrit (and Vedic) N-V formations in the context of the grammaticalization ofthe perfect in Indo-Aryan. However, the modern Indo-Aryan perfect/perfective arose from the adjectivalpast participle in -ta and the picture of the distribution and properties painted by Ittz´es (2022) of the OldIndo-Aryan N-V combinations is very much like the structure and properties described and analyzed byMohanan (1994) for modern Hindi N-V complex predicates. Furthermore, there are three major light verbsinvolved: ‘do’, ‘be’, ‘become’, which each show constraints on permissible combinations and frequencyeffects. This is exactly what is found for Urdu/Hindi in a corpus study conducted by Ahmed and Butt(2011). Thus, rather than adducing evidence against Butt&Lahiri’s claim as to the pertinacity of light verbs,Ittz´es (2022) provides more evidence for Butt&Lahiri’s claim from the domain of N-V combinations.

Peter Hook points to data from Grierson (1928). This data is interesting, but turns out to be too sparseto decide the matter one way or another. In conclusion, we show that overall Butt&Lahiri’s central claimcontinues to hold up— there are no instances of auxiliaries that have developed from light verbs.

References

Ahmed, Tafseer and Butt, Miriam. 2011. Discovering Semantic Classes for Urdu N-V Complex Predicates. In Proceedingsof the Ninth International Conference on Computational Semantics, IWCS ’11, pages 305–309, Oxford,United Kingdom.

Bowern, Claire. 2008. The Diachrony of Complex Predicates. Diachronica 25(2), 161–185.

Brinton, Laurel J. and Akimoto, Minoji (eds.). 1999. Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Composite Predicates inthe History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Butt, Miriam. 2003. The Morpheme That Wouldn’t Go Away, unpublished Ms., University of Konstanz.

Butt, Miriam. 2010. The Light Verb Jungle: Still Hacking Away. In M. Harvey M. Amberber and B. Baker (eds.),Complex Predicates in Cross-Linguistic Perspective, pages 48–78, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Butt, Miriam and Lahiri, Aditi. 2013. Diachronic Pertinacity of Light Verbs. Lingua 135, 7–29.

Bybee, Joan, Perkins, Revere and Pagliuca, William. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modalityin the Languages of the World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Davison, Alice. 2014. Non-finite complements and modality in dee-naa ‘allow’ in Hindi-Urdu. Natural Language andLinguistic Theory 32, 137–164.

Grierson, George Abraham. 1928. Linguistic survey of India, volume 9. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent ofGovernment Printing, India, compiled 1903–1928, 11 v. in 20 : maps (part fold.) ; 36 cm, The Indo-Aryan Family.Central Group. Specimens of the Pah¯ar¯ı Languages and Gujur¯ı.

Hook, Peter Edwin. 1991. The Emergence of Perfective Aspect in Indo-Aryan Languages. In Elizabeth Traugott andB. Heine (eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization, pages 59–89, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Hook, Peter Edwin. 2001. Where do Compound Verbs come from? (and where are they going?). In Peri Bhaskararaoand K.V. Subbarao (eds.), The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, pages 102–130, New Delhi:Sage Publications.

Hopper, Paul J. and Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Iglesias-R´abade, L. 2001. Composite predicates in Middle English with the verbs nimen and taken. Studia Neophilologica73, 143–163.

Ittz´es, M´at´e. 2022. Light verb, auxiliary, grammaticalization: The case of the Vedic periphrastic perfect. Die Sprache54, 95–129.

Jamison, Stephanie. 1976. Functional Ambiguity and Syntactic Change: The Sanskrit Accusative. In Papers from the Parasession on Diachronic Syntax, 12th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, pages 126–135.

Mohanan, Tara. 1994. Argument Structure in Hindi. Stanford, California: CSLI Publications.Slade, Benjamin. 2013. The diachrony of light and auxiliary verbs in Indo-Aryan. Diachronica 30, 531–578.

Speijer, J. S. 1886. Sanskrit Syntax. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, republished 1973.

Registration

Language Tutorial, 1

Lak is a North East Caucasian language spoken in Dagestan, Russia. According to the latest census (2021-2022), it has about 140,000 speakers, though the actual number of native speakers is likely to be significantly lower.

This first session will be a general introduction to the language focussing mainly on phonology and morphology. I will present the vowel and consonant inventory of Lak and then introduce verbal and nominal morphology paying particular attention to realisation of such features as grammatical class/gender, number, and case. Furthermore, I will discuss the intricate system of nominal allomorphy.

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Linguistics in the 21st century: What are we up to? - Enoch Aboh, University of Amsterdam

Linguistics Association Lecture

Since Chomsky’s (1965) characterization of the object of linguistic inquiry some sixty years ago (i.e., an ideal speaker-listener in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly…, p. 3), there has been a tremendous development in formal syntax, with important discoveries about structure building (e.g., Minimality or fundamental aspects of first and/or second language acquisition). Insights from formal syntax have also led to subsequent developments in experimental work (e.g., acquisition of pronouns and binding theory, long distance dependencies), all of which brought new insight into the human brain and mind.

Yet, a cursory look at natural contexts of language acquisition and use in various ecologies outside Western and highly educated populations (e.g., Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia) suggests that the current generative model must be revised. We must move away from the monolingual bias (including nativism) and adopt universal multilingualism as the default. Based on multilingual ecologies in Africa, the birth place of the human language capacity and now home to about a third of the languages of the world, I reflect on the emergence of grammar out of contact. The latter is understood as resulting from interactions between individual speaker-/signer-learners (SSL’s) with different idiolects, which provide the appropriate context for acquisition (and change). Under this view, contacts between SSL’s create a unique situation in which syntactic properties underlying clause structure emerge, as a result of feature recombination. This is a general instance of Merge applying across different modules (e.g., morphosyntax, phonology, semantics). It is an innate human cognitive capacity, which allows SSL’s to select specific linguistic features from the heterogeneous inputs they are exposed to, and recombine them into new variants. As it appears, the result is a hybrid construct. The examples of recombination presented in this talk are based on data from serial verb constructions involving Gungbe, French, (and Haitian Creole).

Language Tutorial, 2

Lak is a North East Caucasian language spoken in Dagestan, Russia. According to the latest census (2021-2022), it has about 140,000 speakers, though the actual number of native speakers is likely to be significantly lower.

The second session will be an overview of Lak syntax (and morphosyntax). I will cover such topics as word order and question formation. Unlike many related languages, Lak has developed person agreement in addition to class/number agreement found in other languages of the family. Lak is an ergative language that has two types of split ergativity. I will also discuss whether long-distance agreement exists in Lak. Furthermore, I will show that Lak has unusual agreement targets which include anaphors, adverbs, and locational phrases.