Part of
The Language of Memory in a Crosslinguistic PerspectiveEdited by Mengistu Amberber
[Human Cognitive Processing 21] 2007
► pp. 263–277
This paper provides a brief grammatical overview of a number of constructions based on verbs of memory in Amharic. We show that the same verb can mean ‘x remember y’ or ‘x remind y’ depending on the syntactic context. Remember is a subject-experiencer predicate, in that the experiencer is mapped on to subject position. The subject pronominal suffix on the verb agrees with the experiencer argument. In the case of ‘remind’, the experiencer is mapped onto object position and agrees with an optional object pronominal suffix on the verb.