Monday, July 13, 2015

Detail 183: Multiple Lexically Conditioned Aspect Markers of Varying Syntactic Type

We're used to relatively predictable aspect markers of a somewhat clearly "unified" type. Let us play with a slightly less unified system!

One obvious way from which we could derive perfectiveness could be a dummy object. I.e. 'we ate' → ~we were eating, 'we ate the food' → ~we ate (perfective). For transitive verbs, 'food' might appear as a determiner for the object:
we ate moussaka → ~we were eating moussaka
we ate the food moussaka → ~we ate the moussaka
Now, different verbs take different nouns like this, and they are grammaticalized and generally speaking monosyllabic.
we walk demonstrative-lative → ~ we arrive
we walk → ~ we are currently walking
We can also have other noun types:
we eat our fill, they received their portion, etc
In such constructions, the aspect particle gets person congruence!

Sometimes, verbs serve this role: we speared killed the animal.

Now, we can imagine a system where aspect is marked by lots of lexemes in a varied and wildly unpredictable system, where also different subjects may trigger different markers, i.e. 'we ate the food moussaka', but 'the livestock ate the fodder grass', so you can have multiple interacting implications of different strengths.

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