Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Detail #264: Some Origins for Dual Marking on Verbs

Consider the comitative. Now, let's consider this grammaticalization path:
general comitative case exists
the language has plural and singular congruence

>
 the comitative is lost, in general
 pronouns retain it, though

>

comitative pronouns get more restricted in distribution, and only appear after verbs

>

comitative pronouns are phonologically reduced and turned into affixes

>

the usage patterns make the meaning more like 'singular subject doing a thing together with singular comitative'

>

meaning slowly changes to just meaning 'two subjects'
Another possibility would be an adverb-like 'with' that needs no noun (but can take one). Things like 'he went with' come to signify 'he went [with (discourse topic)]'. Another possibility is for an applicative comitative voice, possibly by incorporating a comitative adposition.

No comments:

Post a Comment