Chapter published in:
Category Change from a Constructional Perspective
Edited by Kristel Van Goethem, Muriel Norde, Evie Coussé and Gudrun Vanderbauwhede
[Constructional Approaches to Language 20] 2018
► pp. 15–46

Chapter 2
Category genesis in Chitimacha

A constructional approach

The genesis of new lexical categories poses a challenge to theories of diachronic change: If there are no pre-existing words in the class to analogize to, how does the category arise? This paper shows that a constructional approach to category change successfully accounts for the genesis of a diverse class of preverbs in Chitimacha, an isolate of the U.S. Southeast linguistic area. It is shown that what enabled the creation of the preverb category was schematization across a variety of forms with similar properties, namely, a preverbal syntactic position and a directional semantics. Category genesis can therefore be viewed as simply a special case of constructionalization wherein schematization plays a crucial role.
Keywords: Chitimacha, category genesis, schematicity, schematization, constructionalization, preverbs
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Preverbs in Chitimacha
    • 3.1 ʔap venitive
    • 3.2 ʔapš reditive
    • 3.3 hi andative
    • 3.4 his adreditive
    • 3.5 kap super-lative
    • 3.6 kaːpʼs superreditive
    • 3.7 ka translative
    • 3.8 kas transreditive
    • 3.9 ni detransitivizer
  • 4.The constructionalization of Chitimacha preverbs
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 March 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.20.02hie
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