LISSIM 6

June 1-15, 2012@ Kangra

Selected Essays

Diti Bhadra
Rutgers University

 

• How did LISSIM 5 help in improved understanding of your research topic?
The interest I had in my current research topic from before LISSIM 5 was greatly pushed forward by the extremely enlightening talks and discussions at LISSIM 5. My current research topic explores an unique set of adverbs in Bangla – the Reduplicated Verbal Adverbs (RVAdv)(Abbi,1991) – which do not behave like lexical adverbs in the language.
 

Considering a structure like (1) :

having the main verb, and a non-main verb which reduplicates to form an adverb which is marked with aspectual inflection. My analysis, which is different from Cinque’s (1999) idea of base generating adverbs in specs of maximal projections of different functional heads, proposes the following:
The non-main verb, V1, raises to the aspect head, gets inflected with the aspect marker there, and then reduplicates in that position to give a structure of the form – subject V+asp V+asp Direct Object Main Verb. This V+asp V+asp complex behaves like an adverb in modifying the event of the main verb in some way – viewpoint aspect is expressed by either a causal relationship between the two, or a simultaneous reading, or a few other possible readings – i.e. various aspectual categories like Imperfective aspect, Perfective aspect, Prospective Aspect, Interruptive aspect, etc.

This analysis has a couple of merits:

• Numerous functional heads corresponding to each of the different aspects need not be postulated
(unlike Cinque 1999). This analysis points out that there are, in effect, only two aspectual suffixes in
Bangla, -te (imperfective) and –e (perfective).And the non-main verb always raises to the suffix (in Aspo) and reduplicates in that position. Thus, unique resultant aspectual readings are achieved at LF and the syntax need not account for it with a panorama of different heads.

• The fact that the application of Cinque’s analysis failed to capture – the presence of aspectual
inflection on the RVAdv – is captured by this analysis. This analysis recognizes these adverbs in question
as very different from the lexical adverbs that Cinque deals with, and thus attempts to provide a
different structural derivational account for them. The fact that these adverbs are base generated as
verbs is a crucial fact that is recognized, and therefore an explanation of suffixation is possible.

• The assumption here is that non-main, adverb-forming verb is assumed to be grammaticalized, such that its original argument structure is lost, and it ends up taking only the TP as its complement. Every single verb that forms an adverb has the same grammaticalized argument structure. This complete parallelism allows us to form a generalization that these elements forming the adverbs are indeed all verbs, which undergo suffixation in a similar way.
One important point is – the syntactic status of the adverb, as of all adverbs, is optional. The projection of V1, and thus of AspP (which ultimately hosts the adverb) is non-obligatory; it a modifier of the Main Verb, and thus an adjunct. However, structurally it differs from canonical adjuncts like regular AdvPs, AdjPs or PPs. Because it is a verb that is reduplicated, the resulting reduplicated structure always denotes some action.

Also, the assumption that these V+asp V+asp complexes are actually adverbs is proved to be valid when I apply Cinque’s strict hierarchy of AdvPs to them:

(2) ‘Chele-ta khe-te khe-te gym-e jab-e jab-e korchhe.’
boy-CL. eat- eat- gym-LOC. go-PERF. go-PERF do-3rdP.PRES.
PROG. PROG‘The boy is eating, and is restless to go to the gym’
 

This order is correct as predicted by Cinque’s hierarchy:
Aspprogressive > Aspprospective

vs.

(3) *‘Chele-ta gym-e jab-e jab-e, khe-te khe-te korchhe.’
boy-CL. gym-LOC. go-PERF. go-PERF eat- eat- do-3rdP.PRES. PROG. PROG

‘The boy is eating, and is restless to go to the gym’

This order, the flip side of (2) is out because it violates Cinque’s hierarchy:
Aspprogressive > Aspprospective

Other orders like Aspperfect > Aspprogressive hold for this class too, which is evidence for the fact that they indeed are adverbs.

LISSIM 5 greatly contributed to the research-based thinking that led onto formulating the above analysis. Jayaseelan’s sessions on adverb positions in clause structure greatly helped me understand the nature of adverbs, and helped me recognize the crucial differences between lexical adverbs and syntactic adverbs such as RVAdvs. He spoke at length on generating OV/VO orders, which also provided me with deeper understanding of the theoretical assumptions that are crucial when proposing any analysis. The sessions on nanosyntax were a great help in understanding what a head node in a tree means, and to what lengths submorphemic orders are universal in the world’s languages. This understanding contributed to my formulating an analysis about the morphology on the adverbs above. Boskovic’s sessions, apart from deepening my understanding of recognizing DPs vs. NPs, also clarified to me the fundamental status of locality in any sort of movement, which led me to inspect in my own analysis, if the motivation for movement was strong enough.

• How would LISSIM 6 help you in sharpening your research question and in looking for a possible answer?

I am looking forward to LISSIM 6 not just to discover perspectives to sharpen my current research question, but in the hope that it will open up completely new avenues of research in the South Asian languages. The varied faculty that we will have this year have covered wide grounds in syntax and semantics in their recent work – Pesetsky’s reanalysis of phrasal movement helps understand the motivation, if any, behind it, and what he calls the ‘diseases and diagnostics’ of such movement. Pancheva’s recent work on nominal and verbal comparatives and Bobaljik’s recent work on the morphosemantics of agreement opens up many pertinent questions for research in South Asian languages, which are morphologically rich enough to mark varied grammatical functions distinctly.
Moltman’s recent analysis of transitive intensional verbs helps in understanding what really is propositional content in sentences and what it really means to confer thematic roles and how far the theory can capture the intricacies of actions, products and times that intensional verbs introduce in grammar.

All in all, I am sure LISSIM 6 will be as much an enlightening experience as LISSIM 5 was. Learning among a group of bright peers who engage with linguistics constantly makes the experience fun, and the opportunity to discuss your own academic ideas with the experienced faculty greatly encourages young scholars like us to think beyond set guidelines and spot the patterns in linguistic phenomena and persistently try to find answers to account for them.



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