Change-of-state paradigms and the middle in Kinyarwanda

Jerro, Kyle

doi:10.2989/16073614.2018.1552168

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Examples (3.c) and (4.c) demonstrate that in Kiwoso, verbs with stative suffixes have inchoative and potential readings. The inchoative and the potentiality interpretations of the stative suffix are also common to many other Bantu languages as observed for Swahili (Mkude 2005), Kagulu (Petzell 2008), Chichewa (Dubinsky and Simango 1996;Mchombo 2004) and Kinyarwanda (Jerro 2018). The following subsection examines the properties of passive and stative suffixes across semantic verb classes.…”

Section: Transitivity Alternations In Relation To Passive and Stativementioning

confidence: 87%

“…Across languages, the morphosyntax of the middle construction is similar and closely relates to passive and anticausative constructions in terms of argument alternation properties (see Schäfer 2008Schäfer , 2009Dom and Bostoen 2018;Jerro 2018). For these constructions, the verb's underlying internal argument surfaces as the grammatical subject.…”

Section: Middle Verb Constructions In Kiwosomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Scholars have reported that one of the strategies of marking the middle in many Bantu languages is the use of the stative morpheme -ik-(see Seidl and Dimitriadis 2003;Fernando 2013;Dom, Kulikov and Bostoen 2016;Jerro 2018). These scholars add that apart from marking middles, the morpheme has different readings including the anticausative and stative.…”

Section: Middle Verb Constructions In Kiwosomentioning

confidence: 99%

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The lexical semantics and syntax interface of anticausative alternations in Kiwoso

Mallya¹

2019

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This paper examines argument alternation constructions in the Bantu language, Kiwoso. The data demonstrates that alternation is constrained by selectional properties of a root and its combination with different functional heads, which is language specific. The findings establish that external arguments of anticausative, passive and middle alternations are distinct in terms of syntax and semantics. The data indicates that external arguments appear as DPs in causative alternates but in anticausative, passive and middle sentences they surface as PPs, albeit with different interpretations. In passives, the PPs are introduced by a na-phrase and express event participants, while in anticausatives and middles they are introduced by a kophrase which denotes event modifiers. It is also established that anticausative, passive and middle verb constructions are related in that their sole subject argument is the object argument of their causative (transitive) variants.

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Section: Transitivity Alternations In Relation To Passive and Stativementioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Middle Verb Constructions In Kiwosomentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Middle Verb Constructions In Kiwosomentioning

confidence: 99%

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The lexical semantics and syntax interface of anticausative alternations in Kiwoso

Mallya¹

2019

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“…Kinyarwanda. Kinyarwanda shows something similar (Jerro 2017b(Jerro , 2018. In Kinyarwanda the simple stative, inchoative, and result stative are usually all labile.…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…In order to verify that the semantic patterns obtain crosslinguistically, we present in-depth studies drawn from prior literature and native-speaker judgments of a small sampling of roots mostly chosen from among those in §3.1. The case studies are Greek (Indo-European; see Spathas 2017), Kakataibo (Panoan; Eastern Peru; see Valle , Kinyarwanda (Northeastern Bantu; Rwanda; see Jerro 2017bJerro , 2018, Hebrew (Semitic, Afro-Asiatic), and Marathi (Indic, Indo-European). The goal is not to show that this pattern is broadly attested, but more modestly to show that certain meanings drawn from the two classes show similar entailment patterns in other languages as a proof of concept, thus showing that it is not obviously an idiosyncrasy of one language.…”

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confidence: 99%

States and changes of state: A crosslinguistic study of the roots of verbal meaning

Beavers¹,

Everdell²,

Jerro³

et al. 2021

Language

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What are the basic building blocks of verb meanings, how are they composed into more complex meanings, and how does this explain the grammatical properties of verbs and their relationships to other words with related meanings? These questions are fundamental to the study of verb meaning, and some of the most fruitful attempts to answer them have come from event-structural theories, wherein verb meanings are assumed to be decomposed into an event template, which captures the verb's broad temporal and causal contours, and an idiosyncratic root shared across templates, which describes specific actions and states for a given verb. An open question is what the division of labor is between the template and the root in a given verb's event template, and whether their meanings are bifurcated: are broad eventive lexical entailments introduced only by the templates, never the idiosyncratic roots? Since event templates and not roots are the primary semantic correlates of a verb's grammatical properties, bifurcation would make strong predictions about the correlation of a verb's broad temporal and causal semantics and its syntax and morphology. We argue against this bifurcation by comparing translation equivalents of Levin's (1993) nondeadjectival vs. deadjectival change-of-state verb roots in English (e.g. result vs. property concept roots) across languages. A broad-scale typological study reveals that property concept roots tend to have unmarked stative forms and marked verbal forms, while result roots have the opposite pattern. Semantic studies of several languages confirm that terms built on result roots always entail change, while terms based on property concept roots do not. This supports a theory wherein result roots entail change independent of the template, contra bifurcation. This supports a more complex, albeit still principled, theory of possible event-structural meaning and its grammatical correlates, one that takes subclasses of roots into account, while showing the value of this type of crosslinguistic methodology for testing the predictions of event-structural approaches.*

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The semantics of applicativization in Kinyarwanda

Jerro

2023

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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This article explores the role of semantics in argument realization by providing a lexical semantic account of the contribution of applicative morphology in the Bantu language Kinyarwanda (Rwanda). I propose that applicativization is best analyzed through a constraint on the paradigmatic relationship between applied and non-applied variants of a verb. Specifically, I argue that the applied variant requires an increase in lexical entailments associated with an internal argument of the predicate, and verb classes have varying lexicalized strategies for how they satisfy this constraint. Building on earlier work on Bantu applicatives, I argue that the syntactic and semantic contributions of an applicative operate independently but with all outputs being subject to the constraint on applicativization that I propose. Taking these facts together, this predicts a typology of three possible outputs for applicativization: one in which the applicative adds a new argument and associated thematic role (the function that is most frequently discussed), one in which the applicative has the effect of giving license to an unrealized participant entailed by the meaning of the verb, and one in which the applicative does not increase valence but rather modifies the thematic role of an existing internal argument. I describe three verb classes in Kinyarwanda which exemplify these three predicted types of output of applicativization. This approach thus subsumes previous observations about the varied functions of applicative morphology under a single analysis as well as builds on earlier work on paradigmatic argument alternations (such as the oblique alternations) by extending such approaches to valency-changing morphology.

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Change-of-state paradigms and the middle in Kinyarwanda

Cited by 6 publications

References 35 publications

The lexical semantics and syntax interface of anticausative alternations in Kiwoso

The lexical semantics and syntax interface of anticausative alternations in Kiwoso

States and changes of state: A crosslinguistic study of the roots of verbal meaning

The semantics of applicativization in Kinyarwanda

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