Valency-changing verb derivation in Somali
Culture and languages
Sabrina Bendjaballah (Université Nantes) and Morgan Nilsson (GU) will give a lecture about their ongoing research on verb morphology in Somali. Welcome!
Seminar
Sabrina Bendjaballah (Université Nantes) and Morgan Nilsson (GU) will give a lecture about their ongoing research on verb morphology in Somali. Welcome!
Somali has a number of valency-changing morphemes.
kar-aa 'boils (intr.) cun-aa 'eats'
kar-i-yaa 'boils, cooks (tr.)' cun-sii-yaa 'feeds'
kar-sad-aa 'cooks for oneself'
beddel-aa 'changes (tr.) (-aa/-yaa marks present tense)
beddel-m-aa 'changes (intr.)'
beddeshaa (<*beddel-t-aa) 'changes for one's own benefit (clothes, job, money etc.)'
The synchronic morphology of these morphemes has been quite well studied, but the syntactic and semantic characteristics of these derivations have been studied quite little. Corpora for Somali are still underdeveloped, and the existing studies are therefore mostly based on dictionary data and introspection. Extensive textual data has still not been studied, and we are therefore building a database documenting the relevant morphemes in context.
Dictionaries list several verbs that are not in frequent use, and several high-frequency verbs are not found in the dictionaries. The dictionary translations are also not reliable enough to give a full picture of the semantics of these verbs. But most importantly, the syntactic behaviour is not reported in the dictionaries, and only very briefly discussed in grammars and other studies.
Some of the main questions that we are addressing in our study are:
- Somali has two causative morphemes, /i/ and /sii/. What is the difference?
- Causatives are sometimes used with the preposition ka 'from, of' referring to the agent. What governs the use of this preposition?
- There are two types of 'middle' derivations, with /t/ and /st/. What is the difference?
- The middles have also been called autobenefactive (and reflexive). What is their core semantics? How productive are the middles?
- Derivatives with /m/ have been called passive. It clearly is so historically and in other Cushitic languages, but are they still passive in Somali, or anti-causative?
In this talk we will give a brief report on our preliminary findings and say a few words about the database we are building.