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Self-affective or self-benefactive action.

Self-affective or self-benefactive action is an action or state that affects the subject of the sentence in some way, usually to h. benefit, but sometimes not in any clearly beneficial way. (This is what has been called `reflexive' by other grammarians, but is not an adequate description of many of its uses.) Sometimes the benefaction is clearly for someone else, as in (5) below. Beyond the benefaction, Ø´Ô koo is essentially a completive aspect marker as well, since whatever else happens, the implication is that the action was definitely accomplished. Compare sentences with and without Ø´Ô koo such as

and

The latter implies completion, so cannot be followed by

without contradition. Other examplesAnnamalai 1981. of uses of the AM koo are

If the third example did not have aspectual Ø´Ô koo, i.e. were simply ¼Ô¨ ½º¢×» Íà¢Ø»¨ naan panatte edutteen, the meaning would be `I took the money (but not for myself, i.e. I transported it somewhere for someone else.') The accidental and volitional meanings of Ø´Ô koo are somewhat problematical, since the last two examples above can also be reversed, i.e., R. cut his hair by accident and R. cut his hand on purpose, but since this is not what one usually expects of people, the expected result is the preferred interpretation.One might find a parallel to this in the English `aspectual commentary' verbal expressions `manage to vb' and `go and vb', e.g. `Ramasamy managed to cut himself in the hand' and `Ramasamy went and cut himself in the hand'. In both of these the implication is that Ramasami is not very competent or not very much in control of his life, whereas `Ramasami managed to get his hair cut' implies that our incompetent Ramasami finally got his act together and got his hair cut. The decision as to whether an action was deliberate or accidental depends on how society valorizes the effect. In this case, South Asian society valorizes deliberate hair-cutting and devalorizes deliberate mutilation of one's body, unless done for religious reasons.



next up previous
Next: Simultaneity. Up: The aspectual verb Previous: Aspectual distinctions



Vasu Renganathan
Sat Nov 2 21:16:08 EST 1996