Abstract
AbstractThe present article studies verbs that are used to conveychange-of-statein the Finnic languages: “to come”, “to go”, “to remain/stay”, “to get”, “will be”, “to make/do”, and “to be born/give birth”. These are polysemous core verbs, which can be expected to be integrated in constructions with (new) generalized grammatical meaning. As will be shown, in order to conveychange-of-statetypically they occur in constructions that either mark the goal and the source or leave both unmarked. In addition, change can be associated with experiential, existential, and possessive constructions, which also enable to shed more light on the development of the above-mentioned verbs, including the possible developmentchange-of-state→future. The article demonstrates that each Finnic language uses several verbs from the list presented above, but there are differences in what are the most commonly used ones and in what kind of constructions they occur. In some languages, there is a generalchange-of-stateverb, which also appears as a future copula if there is no competing future copula. In the case of Estonian, Finnish, and Livonian, the results of previous studies onchange-of-statepredicates were used; for the other Finnic languages, a separate data set was compiled using various collections of texts.
Highlights
The present article studies the expression of CHANGE-OF-STATE in the Finnic languages by means of intransitive analytic constructions.1 The Finnic languages discussed here employ a verb meaning “to come”, “to go”, “to remain/stay”, “to get”, “will be”, “to make/do”, and “to be born”/“give birth”; see the use of Ingrian sāvva “to get” (e.g. 1)2 and Estonian jääda3 “to remain/stay” (e.g. 2)
The results show that all the Finnic languages contain several CHANGE-OF-STATE predicates in various intransitive constructions
It only varies from language to language, which of the seven verbs (“to come”, “to go”, “to remain/stay”, “to get”, “will be”, “to make/do”, and “to be born”/”give birth”) commonly occur as CHANGE-OF-STATE predicates, in what constructions and to what extent they function as future copulas
Summary
The present article studies the expression of CHANGE-OF-STATE in the Finnic languages by means of intransitive analytic constructions. The Finnic languages discussed here employ a verb meaning “to come”, “to go”, “to remain/stay”, “to get”, “will be”, “to make/do”, and “to be born”/“give birth”; see the use of Ingrian sāvva “to get” (e.g. 1) and Estonian jääda3 “to remain/stay” (e.g. 2). This enables later to regard the Finnic verbs against the broader background, i.e. how common they are cross linguistically. As regards the expression of CHANGE-OF-STATE, cross linguistically the commonest sources are the verbs “to go” and “to come” (Heine and Kuteva 2002: 74–5); see e.g. Their development is sometimes explained using the conceptual metaphor STATES ARE LOCATIONS, from which it is deduced that CHANGE OF STATE IS CHANGE OF LOCATION (Radden 1996) It can be represented as follows: X MOVES TO Ylocation → X CHANGES TO Ystate (Bonnefille 2006: 22)
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