LINGUIST List 30.705
Wed Feb 13 2019
Diss: Barein; Afroasiatic; General Linguistics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology: Joseph Lovestrand: '' DATE Message Subject ( Help ) Msg # Serial verb constructions in Barayin: Typology, description and lexical-functional grammar''
Editor for this issue: Sarah Robinson <srobinsonlinguistlist.org>
Date: 10-Feb-2019
From: Joseph Lovestrand <joeylovestrand
gmail.com>
Subject: DATE Message Subject ( Help ) Msg # Serial verb constructions in Barayin: Typology, description and lexical-functional grammar
E-mail this message to a friend Institution: University of Oxford
Program: D.Phil. in Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2018
Author: Joseph Lovestrand
Dissertation Title: Serial verb constructions in Barayin: Typology, description and lexical-functional grammar
Dissertation URL:
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:39406562-02d3-46f5-abf3-180d22225925 Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
Semantics
Syntax
Typology
Subject Language(s):
Barein (bva) Language Family(ies): Afroasiatic
Dissertation Director:
Mary Dalrymple
Dissertation Abstract:
Barayin is an East Chadic language spoken by around 5000 people in the Guera region of the Republic of Chad. This dissertation examines a particular type of syntactic construction in the language, serial verb constructions, from the perspectives of typological (or comparative) syntax, descriptive grammar, and the formal syntactic theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). Typologically, serial verb constructions are problematic because they represent a heterogeneous set of multiverb constructions that have features that do not fit into traditional syntactic categories like subordination, conjunction and adjunction. Part A of this dissertation describes these problematic features in detail, providing a succinct overview of the literature which can serve as a resource for field linguists describing similar constructions. Part B of the dissertation gives a detailed description of the morphology, syntax and semantics of serial verb constructions in Barayin. These chapters contribute to our knowledge of the world’s languages by documenting a complex syntactic phenomenon in an area of the world where most of the languages are significantly understudied. The most common type of SVC in Barayin involves a deictic motion verb. The motion is normally (but not always) understood to take place prior to the activity or state predicated by the main verb. The formal analysis of Barayin SVCs in Lexical-Functional Grammar in Part C uses recent developments in the theory to show how argument sharing in SVCs can be represented in a connected s-structure that conforms to the standard mechanisms of LFG. The approach is compared to two previous analyses of complex motion predicates in other languages which appeal to a non-standard formal mechanism to model complex predicates.
Page Updated: 13-Feb-2019