Nominalizations and aspect

Languages that have aspectually-conditioned ergativity splits generally oppose a "perfect" tense (often called perfective or aorist), with ergative-absolutive case pattern, to an imperfective where case marking follows the nominative-accusative pattern. The split exists in main clauses in several northern Je languages, among which Mebengokre, though in a slightly different form. MRbengokre opposes two verbal forms that roughly express an aspectual opposition between a "perfect", and a perfective or unmarked aspect. Rather than being two forms of the verb that differ simply in an aspectual feature, however, these forms (herein referred to as A and B, respectively) differ in many important respects: 1. Form A: (a) has a wide range of temporally stative interpretations when not embedded; (b) heads ergative-absolutive clauses; (c) is the only verbal form that can be embedded; (d) when embedded, its temporal and aspectual interpretation depend on that of the main clause; 2. Form B: (a) has a perfective interpretation; advances narrative time; (b) heads nominative-accusative clauses; (c) can't be embedded. In this dissertation, I propose that the opposition between the A and the B form boils down to an opposition between a truly verbal form (the B form) and a nominal form of the verb (the A form), and that the change in category explains both the ergative marking and the perfect interpretation associated with the A form. I argue that nominalization underlies many aspectually-conditioned splits described in the literature, as well as being at the core of the perfect construction in languages such as French and Italian. For the analysis to go through, two propositions have to be worked out: (i) that ergativity is a given when there is nominalization, and (ii) that the interpretation of a nominalization used as a main clause is in fact that of the perfect.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Salanova, Andrés Pablo

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sabine Iantridou.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41697

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/41697