Roots and verbs in North Saami
Author
Editor
- Ida Toivonen
- Diane Nelson
Summary, in English
Although it has been argued lately that roots have no lexical category, a
close look at deadjectival and denominal verbs in North Saami reveals that roots nevertheless differ with respect to their semantic type, and that this semantic contrast between roots leads to systematic syntactic and semantic differences between derived verbs. More specifically, state-denoting (‘adjectival’) roots can combine directly with a verbalizer, yielding verbs that mean ‘be Root’, ‘become Root’ or ‘cause to be Root’. Entity-denoting roots, on the other hand, must combine with a (possibly abstract) preposition before the verbalizer is merged, and because of the obligatory presence of the preposition, the result is a verb that means ‘have Root’, ‘get Root’ or ‘cause to have Root’. Hence, it is not the case that any root can appear in just any syntactic environment.
close look at deadjectival and denominal verbs in North Saami reveals that roots nevertheless differ with respect to their semantic type, and that this semantic contrast between roots leads to systematic syntactic and semantic differences between derived verbs. More specifically, state-denoting (‘adjectival’) roots can combine directly with a verbalizer, yielding verbs that mean ‘be Root’, ‘become Root’ or ‘cause to be Root’. Entity-denoting roots, on the other hand, must combine with a (possibly abstract) preposition before the verbalizer is merged, and because of the obligatory presence of the preposition, the result is a verb that means ‘have Root’, ‘get Root’ or ‘cause to have Root’. Hence, it is not the case that any root can appear in just any syntactic environment.
Department/s
Publishing year
2007
Language
English
Pages
137-166
Publication/Series
Saami Linguistics (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory)
Volume
288
Document type
Book chapter
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Topic
- Languages and Literature
Keywords
- lexical category
- North Saami
- roots
- denominal verbs
- derived verbs
- deadjectival verbs
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISBN: 978 90 272 4803 9