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.
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
-
Appendix
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