Tense and Aspect in IE (dissertation)

255 Pages·2006·1.389 MB·English

by  Ashwini Deo

TENSE AND ASPECT IN INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGES: VARIATION AND
DIACHRONY
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS
AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES
OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Ashwini Deo
September 2006
(cid:13)c Copyright by Ashwini Deo 2007
All Rights Reserved
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I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully
adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.
Paul Kiparsky Principal Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully
adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.
Cleo Condoravdi
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully
adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.
Beth Levin
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully
adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.
Peter Sells
Approved for the University Committee on Graduate Studies.
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Acknowledgements
There are several people involved in the writing of this dissertation who must have collec-
tively contributed more to it than I did and I am grateful for their generosity in letting me
be the sole author of this work for whatever it is worth.
During the writing of this dissertation and more generally, I have been lucky to have
a committee that was an incredible source of ideas, constructive comments, and criticism.
Paul Kiparsky has been the best mentor and guide that I could have had. I have learned
from Paul about the intricacies of Paninian grammar, the beauty and elegance of metrical
verse and its generative analysis, morphology, the importance of doing “amphichronic lin-
guistics”, and much more. This project was directly inspired by his conception of the role
of historical linguistics in linguistic theory, and Paul’s encouragement and engagement have
been instrumental to its development. I can safely say that Cleo Condoravdi has taught
me all the tense/aspect semantics that I know (or think I know). When my historical data
showed me that I needed a semantic analysis and that one wasn’t readily available, Cleo
came to my help and patiently helped me sort through both the semantics literature and
my empirical data. She has treated my ideas with just the right amount of respect and im-
patience and been extremely generous with her ideas to get the analysis to come to whereit
stands now. Beth Levin taught me lexical semantics and how to appreciate the differences
between shades of meaning too subtle for me to grasp. Several times, she has countered
the gross classifications and categorizations I came up with and forced me to look for more
nuanced explanatory generalizations. I am grateful to her for her careful commenting on
severaldraftsandherinsistenceonclarity of presentation andcontent. Peter Sells isagreat
person to try out analyses on and to work out what the properties of a desirable analysis
should be. Meetings with him have always led to a much more clear-headed idea of where
I wanted to go with my projects.
Beyond my committee, I thank David Beaver, Ivan Sag, and Elizabeth Traugott for
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several discussions and comments as this work developed. The Stanford Linguistics De-
partment has been a very congenial and intellectually stimulating environment to work and
grow in and I am fortunate to have had a chance to spend several years here. I also thank
Joan Bresnan and Arnold Zwicky, who contributed a lot to my intellectual development in
my first few years here. I am also grateful to Dr. S.D. Joshi who taught me through Panini
how linguistics should really be done.
For companionship and interesting discussions I thank Luc Baronian, Luis Casillas,
JohnBeavers, BradyClark,CathrynDonhue,AndrewKoontz-Garboden,DmitryLevinson,
Mary Rose, Devyani Sharma, Judith Tonhauser, and Shiao Wei Tham. I am grateful to
Veronica Gerassimova and Itamar Francez for their friendship, which has made graduate
school much more meaningful. Itamar I particularly thank for making the task of filing
long-distance easier and for constantly leaving his Yahoo Chat window open, a practice
that has done wonders for our linguistic growth, among other things.
This dissertation was supposed to be about morphosyntactic variation in Indo-Aryan.
Somewhere along the way, it changed its mind and decided to take the semantics route. A
key factor in this turn was Judith Tonhauser, who in a conversation during a Friday Social,
convinced me to switch, and got me to ‘discover’ formal semantics. I am glad she did.
My informants and friends, scattered over several villages in Northern Maharashtra,
are directly responsible for one of the main empirical claim made in this dissertation —
the loss of the past-present distinction in Middle Indo-Aryan. Their patience and their
interest in my work has been crucial to developing the empirical basis of this work. I would
especially like to thank Chamulal Rathwa and Alka Padwi (Dehawali Bhili), Gulabsingh
Pawra, Bhaisingh Pawra, and Barfi Pawra (Pawri), Suresh Bacchav, Gayatri Bacchav, and
Krishna Mohan (Ahirani), and Bhaskar Gangurde (Konkana) for sharing their language,
culture, and life with me and their careful efforts to teach me aspects of their languages.
The Linguistics department at Konstanz has been like a long-distance linguistic family.
Miriam Butt has been constantly encouraging, ever since I first came to Stanford. She has
been critical to building both my confidence and my skills as a linguist and has seen the
insights I was struggling to express through the murk of incoherent writing. Her comments,
both as a South-Asianist and as a theoretical linguist, have contributed significantly to this
and other work. I am grateful to Miriam and to Aditi Lahiri for inviting me several times
to Konstanz for workshops and research projects.
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I am grateful to the American Institute of Indian Studies for a Junior Research Fel-
lowship to do fieldwork in India during 2003-2004 and to the National Science Foundation
for a Dissertation Improvement Grant between 2003-2005 (BCS 0318478) for field support.
The write-up of this dissertation was greatly facilitated by the Geballe dissertation writing
fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center for 2005-2006.
Ashish Chadha convinced me to make the move from India to the United States to
pursue a Linguistics Ph.D way back in 1999. Among other things, I have to thank him
for lengthy arguments over breakfast that stretched beyond lunch, the best sambar and
maa ki dal in the world, the constant supply of international cinema and in-home LCD
projector arrangements, and for never failing to remind me that, in the larger scheme
of things, everything one does is pointless, but nevertheless one has to continue doing it
wholeheartedly. Ashish is the only karmayogi I know from close and it has been a privilege
learning from him. Iravati, I have to thank for several joys and discoveries. I discovered
through her that a three month old, placed in the right position, is capable of ripping out
keys from a G4 laptop, that an underspecified coronal feature might be acquired before
manner features are acquired, the “Primacy of Aspect” hypothesis, and that a baby is an
extremely useful prop to have around during fieldwork sessions. I also thank my parents-
in-law, Lalit and Urmil Chadha for being great supports and for being much more proud of
me than I deserve. I thank Aditi for being there at all times, and Pawan, Meghana, Maya,
and Reviel for their friendship.
To my parents, Chhaya and Sharad Deo, I owe more than I can express. In addition to
doing all the wonderful things that only parents can do, they typed out the text of the Old
Marathi text Dny¯ane´swari in electronic form for me so that I could run searches through
it and cheerfully took care of their granddaughter for several months while their daughter
was struggling to write her dissertation. I would like to thank my mother for helping me
search through Old and Middle Marathi texts for data that I wanted and for spending six
months in the US taking care her granddaughter. This dissertation is dedicated to both of
them.
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Abbreviations
1 = First Person
2 = Second Person
3 = Third person
abl = Ablative Case
acc = Accusative Case
aor = OIA Aorist
dat = Dative Case
caus = Causative Morpheme
erg = Ergative Case
emph = Emphatic clitic
f = Feminine Gender
fut = Future Tense
gen = Genitive Case
ger = Gerund
impf = OIA Present paradigm (and cognates)
impf = Imperfective Aspect (for crosslinguistic data)
impf = OIA Imperfective Participle (and cognates)
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impfct = OIA Imperfect
imp = Imperative Mood
inf = Infinitival
ins = Instrumental Case
loc = Locative Case
MIA = Middle Indo Aryan
m = Masculine Gender
NIA = New Indo Aryan
n = Neuter Gender
nom = Nominative Case
neg = Negative Particle/ Inflection
OIA = Old Indo Aryan
pass = Passive Voice
perf = OIA resultative stative participle (and cognates)
pst = Past Tense
pfct = OIA Perfect
pl = Plural
pres = Present Tense
prog = Progressive aspect
quot = Quotative Marker
sg = Singular
voc = Vocative Case
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Contents
Acknowledgements v
Abbreviations viii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Unifying semantic and grammaticalization approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2.1 Describing aspectual categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2.2 Markedness, privative opposition, and blocking . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.3 Theoretical proposal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.4 Linguistic scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.4.1 Loss of tense distinctions in Indo-Aryan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.4.2 The diachronic data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.4.3 The synchronic data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.5 Roadmap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2 Aspectual classification and stativity 18
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.2 Aspectual classification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.3 Diagnostics of stativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.3.1 Homogeneity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.3.2 Divisiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.3.3 Cumulativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.3.4 Interpretation in narrative discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.3.5 Time-span adverbials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
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