enaTmecnierebis sakiTxebi ISSUES OF LINGUISTICS - Tbilisi State ...

enaTmecnierebis sakiTxebi _ I-II, 2009
Alice C. Harris
SUNY Stony Brook
Emergence of Morphological Classes 1
1. Introduction
Perlmutter (1978) established that unaccusative intransitive verbs are
systematically distinguished from unergative intransitive verbs in Italian, where the
former group take the auxiliary "be" and the latter take instead "have", as
transitive verbs do. Not long after, Harris (1982) showed that the same groups of
intransitive verbs are distinguished in Georgian by differential case marking in
Series II, by differences of inversion in Series III, and by several morphological
criteria. Since then, the three-way classification of verbs into transitives, unergatives,
and unaccusatives has been widely accepted (e.g. Burzio 1986, Levin and
Rappaport 1995, and Alexiadou et al. 2004), and a wide variety of phenomena have
been associated with this classification of verbs in many languages.
While Harris (1985) deals in detail with the syntactic changes that led to the
syntax that distinguishes among transitive, unergative, and unaccusative verbs, the
morphology that distinguishes these classes was not systematically investigated
there, and the present article seeks to rectify that omission.
Corbett (1991) and Wurzel (1992), in their works on gender, have studied
the origins of gender in classification. While differing in many respects, both agree
that gender systems are originally semantically determined. As they develop, they
often become less semantically defined. In this paper I look at semantic and
morphological classes of verbs from the same point of view, and I believe that
because the changes involved are relatively recent ones, many aspects of the
origins of this system are transparent. I agree with Wurzel that a general problem in
morphology is that inflectional classes have no synchronic motivation; they can
only be explained historically.
The following definition of verb classification is adapted from Wurzel’s
definition of noun classification.
A system of verb classification is said to be present if the verbs (verbal
lexemes) of a language are divided into a limited number of classes, such that the
class membership, at least in certain contexts, is indicated formally.
If the class to which a verb belongs determines that the verb takes one set of
inflectional affixes rather than another set that encodes the same categories and
values, the class is an inflectional one.
Wurzel argues further that nouns are constantly re-classified according to
semantic criteria. Once noun classification is established, it tends toward desemanticization.
Membership in a class becomes conventional, arbitrary. Some
parallels to these observations can be found in the Georgian verb classification,
though I do not dwell here on these similarities.
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