The next talk in the Cognitive Development Center seminar series will be given by: Anne Tamm, CEU Date: Wednesday, February 2, 2011 Location: CEU Cognitive Develoment Center, Hattyú u. 14, 3rd floor * Cross-Categorial Case: Telicity and Evidentiality* Cross-categorial case (a.k.a. ‘case on verbs’, ‘verbal case’, ‘versatile case’, henceforth: CCC) is a cover term for various case phenomena in atypical syntactic environments (e.g., on verbs), and expressing atypical semantics (e.g., tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, negation). Previous scholarship has discovered ‘verbal case’ in several languages across the world. For instance, Blake (2001) describes case in the verbal tense and aspect system of Kalaw Lagaw Ya. Aikhenvald (2008) discusses the ‘versatile cases’ of Ket and Manambu, which express aspect and modality or temporal, causal and other relationships between clauses. Analyses of more accessible languages with rich CCC systems were missing until the rich pool of data of the Uralic languages was discovered. The Uralic languages provide excellent linguistic and extra-linguistic conditions for exploring the complexity of interdependent factors: rich nominal and cross-categorial case paradigms, a wide scale of forms between verbs and nominals, well-documented diachronic and synchronic variation (especially in Finnic or Permic), existing descriptions of spatial and non-spatial semantics of the cases. Integrating the new research agenda with the new data and with previous scholarship has resulted in the insight that CCCs are rarely markers of prototypical predicate categories but have retained much of their core semantics. In addition to their idiosyncratic morphosyntactic constraints, CCCs impose semantic and pragmatic constraints on their environment: the nature of the evidence, evaluation of knowledge, and expectations about the goals of activities. Tendencies in the grammaticalization of predicate functional categories have become clearer: e.g., spatial cases tend to give rise to tense-aspect marking, comitatives to Aktionsart (intensification, habituality), and abessives to negation. The partitive case provides the example of cross-categorial case, which in present-day Estonian exemplifies the diachronic evolution path from a spatial case to an aspectual case and further, to a marker of epistemic modality and evidentiality. The categories of aspect and evidentiality preserve the basic semantics of the spatial partitive; the example provides an illustration of the shared structure of these categories. _______________________________________________ Subscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-subscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-unsubscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu