Two types of morphologically expressed non-verbal predication

Abstract

The morphological expression of non-verbal predication is a geographically widespread, although not very frequent, typological feature. This paper highlights the existence of two radically contrasting types of non-verbal predicative inflection. Construction A has already been described in the literature. It consists of attaching person-sensitive inflection markers to non-verbal predicates, possibly extending this treatment to adverbs and adverbial phrases (locational and temporal), pronouns and quantifiers. This type is well attested in Uralic, Turkic, and Paleosiberian, as well as in some Amazonian language families (most notably Chicham), but it has also been pointed out for some sparse languages of Oceania and Africa. Such non-verbal person inflections diachronically stem from incorporation of conjugated copula elements. Construction B, by contrast, is much rarer and is described here for the first time. It also consists of a dedicated morphological form of the non-verbal predicate (limited, however, to nouns and adjectives), but such form stands out as morphologically lighter than any other form to be found in nouns or adjectives in argument or attribute position. While the latter forms carry some kind of case marker, the noun/adjective predicate merely consists (or historically did) of the word’s root. This type of construction can be found in the small Zamucoan family and still survives in some Tupí-Guaraní languages. Diachronic inspection of Semitic indicates, however, that this predicative strategy was possibly adopted in some ancient varieties, although at later stages it intertwined with the expression of referential specificity. The paper compares the two construction types, highlighting similarities and differences.

How Historical Data Complement Fieldwork: New Diachronic Perspectives on Zamucoan Verb Inflection*

“…This is evidence that they stem from a Proto‐Zamucoan verb which distinguished 3.real and 3.irr, possibly its only forms. If inflected, number words have the same morphology as nouns and adjectives, which includes forms with predicative value, as well as others not reported here (see Ciucci 2016 and Bertinetto, Ciucci & Farina 2019 for details). However, as nominals do not mark mood, the uses of the two forms of ‘one’ (71b, e) have changed: in CH, for instance, tsom̥ɨraˀ and nom̥ɨraˀ (71e) are in free alternation.…”

“…In Zamucoan, nouns and adjectives can be the head of the intransitive predicate and mostly have specific forms marking the predicative function (seeBertinetto, Ciucci & Farina 2019).…”

Zamucoan Person Marking as a Perturbed System*

“…They are in fact purely fusional in the nominal system, as proven by the fact that every noun carries a suffix simultaneously expressing Gender and Number (plus a third feature, called Form; see Bertinetto et al. 2019). This extends to adjectives, which in addition inflect for Gender (masculine vs feminine).…”

“…Some observations are in order: (i)Each cell of Table 6 should be intended as shown in the top left cell (under *P‐Z), namely with suffix added to root, to indicate the obligatory presence of a marker expressing the features Gender and, as required by the contextual referential properties of the possessum , Number (plus, in addition, the feature Form, irrelevant to the purpose of this paper; see Bertinetto et al. 2019). For simplicity’s sake, the obligatory suffix is ignored in the remaining cells of Table 6. (ii)The Zamucoan possessive prefixes, which specify the possessor, sit on the possessum .…”

Zamucoan ethnonymy in the 18th century and the etymology of Ayoreo

“…As one can see from Table 1, the singular predicative form diachronically coincides with the root. The fact that the marking of the predicative function is morphologically lighter than that of the argument is rare in the world's languages (Bertinetto, Ciucci, and Farina 2019). The singular predicative form is also the starting point for any morphological operation and is often epicene, that is, common to both genders, as shown in Table 2.…”