The Grammaticalization of Aspect in Tamil
and its
semantic sources
Harold F. Schiffman
Department of
Abstract
Tamil has a number of verbs, sometimes
referred to as 'aspectual verbs' that are added to a main or lexical verb to
provide semantic distinctions such as
duration, completion, habituality, regularity, continuity, simultaneity,
definiteness, expectation of result, remainder of result, current relevance,
benefaction, antipathy, and certain other notions. Though these aspectual verbs are found all
over the Indian linguistic area (Emeneau 1956) researchers have generally found
them difficult to describe in a categorical
way, and not until Annamalai 1981 has any
attempt been made to treat aspect in Tamil (or for that matter, any
Dravidian language) as a variable component of the grammar. In what follows I will
summarize what has been discovered about aspect in Tamil and place it in a framework that recognizes both
variability and the process of grammaticalization, that is, how a
category becomes part of the
morphology in a given language. I will
show that Tamil aspect is a
category that is on the road to grammaticalization, and that it is primarily by
the process of metaphoric extension that
the semantic and grammatical change takes
place. Some aspectual verbs are
already, as it were, at their destination,
others are proceeding with all deliberate speed toward that goal, but
some are straggling, some have gotten
lost, and some are only just beginning to pack
for the journey. I will show that aspect is a variable category within
the grammar of a given speaker, but is also variable across dialects and idiolects, and between Literary Tamil
(LT) and Spoken Tamil (ST).
1. Introduction. Tamil has a number of
verbs, sometimes referred to as `aspectual verbs' (or aspect markers, aspectual
auxiliaries, verbal extensions, post-verbs, intensive verbs …) that are added
to a main or lexical verb to provide semantic distinctions such as duration,
completion, habituality, regularity, continuity, simultaneity, definiteness,
expectation of result, remainder of result, current relevance, benefaction,
antipathy, and certain other notions.
Researchers
have generally found these aspect markers difficult to describe in a
categorical way, and in only a few studies (Annamalai 1985) has any attempt
been made to treat aspect in Tamil (or for that matter, any Dravidian language)
as a variable component of the grammar, or as a system that
is in a state of dynamic evolution (Steever 1982). In this paper I will attempt to summarize
what is known about the facts of aspect-marking in Tamil and to place it in a
larger framework, recognizing that a number of different analytic approaches to
this difficult topic are necessary. Aspect is a variable category in Tamil,
but this variability is a product of the process of grammaticalization
(Hopper and Traugott 1993), rather
than representing or being expressive of
sociolinguistic parameters.[1]
2. Aspect and
Commentary. Tamil
aspect markers provide information and commentary about the manner
in which an action occurred, especially how it began or ended, whether
it was intentional or unintentional, whether it had an effect on the speaker or
on someone else, whether it preceded another action or was synchronous with it,
and so on. Some of these notions are
what have been considered aspectual in other languages (having to do with the
completion or non-completion, the continuity or duration, the manner of inception or completion) but some have
little or no relation semantically to classical notions of aspect, by which I
mean aspect as seen, e.g. in the Slavic languages. These `extended' uses of aspect markers
sometimes therefore involve value judgments by the speaker about the actions of
others, i.e. they indicate what the speaker's attitudes or expectations
about the verbal action in question are.
Most
aspect markers are derived historically from some lexical verb that is more or
less still in use in Tamil but has its own lexical meaning. The `meaning' of aspect markers is primarily
grammatical or syntactic and usually only vestigially can be related to the
lexical meaning of the verb from which it is derived. It is here that the role of metaphor comes into
play, since it is by metaphoric
extension of the lexical meaning (especially the spatial meanings) that the
grammatical meaning is arrived at.[2]
Syntactically,
aspect markers are added to the adverbial participle (AVP) of the lexical
(`main') verb. Aspect markers then are
marked for tense and person-number-gender (PNG), since the AVP preceding them
cannot be so marked. Morphologically
(but not phonologically) they then act identically to the lexical verb from which
they are derived, i.e. take the tense markers etc. of the class of lexical verb
they are identical to. In most analyses of aspect in Tamil,
researchers have focused on Literary Tamil, and have tried to show that aspect
can be considered a syntactic process, since the aspect markers appear to
function independently of morphology. I
believe this claim is enabled by the artifact of modern writing, where Tamil
aspect markers are (or can be) written with spaces between them and the AVP of
the lexical verb. In Spoken Tamil, as I
have tried to show, aspect has become (or is becoming) grammaticalized, i.e.,
aspectual markers now function (in many
cases) as part of the morphology of
the language, as evidenced by the phonological processes that apply to them
that usually only apply word-internally (Schiffman 1993[3]). In this paper I will show that Tamil aspect
is a category that is variably
grammaticalized. My focus will be
on the role of metaphor in the
evolution of this system, such that the lexical meanings of the source verb
being aspectualized gradually yield/expand to metaphoric extensions of those
meanings, and as the lexical meanings are leached out, grammaticalization of
the verb as an aspectual marker takes
place. These aspect markers are thus no
longer lexical verbs, nor are they, when completely grammaticalized, independent verbs at all---they lose their syntactic independence and become
morphological suffixes affixed to main or lexical verbs, as evidenced by their
lack of syntactic freedom, which we see from the phonological rules that apply
to them but not their lexical analogs.
2.1. Types of Lexical
Meanings. What
is crucial in the role of metaphor is the types of lexical meanings that the
source verbs have or had; in almost all cases, we can identify the following
semantic elements:
·
Deixis, having to do with
motion, spatial relation, or proximity to(ward) or away from the speaker. This
varies, of course, and as we shall see, the 'meanings' of different directions
with regard to speaker are valued differently (e.g. 'up is good, down is bad'
etc.)
·
Stasis, having to do with
continuity, duration, lack of boundedness, habituality, etc. of action or state.
·
Antipathy: the value of the action or state is negative;
(speaker does not like some action or
state; the negative or pejorative notions are what I refer to below as attitudinal .)
·
Containment, in particular abrupt
closure, interruption, boundedness, or finiteness of an action, but also continuity or duration.
In
many cases, more than one of these semantic elements is part of the lexical
meaning of the source verb, and the metaphoric extension/abstraction of any or all of these meanings moves the
verb along the continuum to grammaticalized aspect in different ways. Aspect as a grammatical category is thus
derived from the semantic elements of deixis, stasis, antipathy, and/or
containment. (Parallels with the evolution of aspect in other languages may
suggest themselves, since many languages that have aspectual systems seem to
have involved the grammaticalization of semantic elements similar to one or
more of these meanings.[4])
2.2 Metaphor and
Metonymy. Metaphoric
extension, however, is not the only semantic process involved in
grammaticalization, and some researchers in fact prefer to emphasize the role
of metonymy, or metonymic transfer, instead of metaphor. Metonymy of course
refers to the transfer of meaning from adjacent material, such as in the
evolution of French negation involving particles such as pas, which originally meant ‘pace, step’ and was originally used
only with verbs of motion. Thus in a sentence such as je ne
marche pas [I neg walk pace]
‘I don’t walk’, the lexical item pas
was probably used originally emphatically, and probably only with verbs of
motion, but as French came to delete the
negative particle ne in most modern
colloquial speech, je ne marche pas
was reduced to je marche pas, and the
meaning of ‘negation’ was transferred metonymically from the no-longer present ne to pas. This is now the overall
pattern in modern colloquial French, and
is not restricted just to simple negation with pas, but with other nouns or particles that now function as
negative markers, such as personne,
guere, rien, que, etc. since ne
is not present in most informal colloquial speech. Similarly,
forms in English like gonna
‘(be) going to’ which originally had a directional meaning, as in He's
gonna get married, i.e., ‘he is proceeding to a place where he will get
married’ have gradually come to have an ‘intentional’ or ‘future’ meaning and
the ‘directional’ meaning is lost. The
‘intentional’ or ‘future’ meanings are in fact derived metonymically from the
‘future’ meaning that is implied by
sentences like ‘He’s going to get married’ i.e. if he’s proceeding to the place
to get married, marriage is what will
take place, and he’s intending to do
so, not just moving in that direction.
Thus
the ‘intentional’ or ‘future’ is metonymically transferred to ‘be going to’ and
this is then phonologically reduced to gonna,
if and only if the meaning is ‘future/intentional’ but not if the meaning is
still directional, i.e. if the meaning
is ‘He's going to the store’, this cannot be reduced to* He's gonna the store.
Therefore, while I do not deny the importance of metonymic transfer in
the evolution of grammaticalization, I do not see it as the main operative
factor in the Tamil material at hand; metaphor still seems to me to what
underlies the evolution of Tamil aspectual verbs, as I will try to show in what
follows.
3.
The focus of this paper: The focus
of this paper will be on those elements of the meanings of lexical verbs
recruited to serve as aspectual verbs that have to do with spatial relations, in particular relations perceived by the speaker
to express his or her personal space, and/or relationship to his/her body. That is, verbs that express motion away from
or towards the speaker, verbs that express static proximity to or distance from
the speaker, verbs that express benefit or benefaction to the speaker (e.g. as the result of obtaining some
benefit, containing some action or benefit, or something pertaining to the
speaker) seem to be those that are
recruited as aspect markers.
Furthermore, any action that is antithetical or malefactive to/for the
speaker (speaker perceives the motion, the action, the pertainment to be
threatening, annoying, disgusting, invasive, etc.) may also become an aspectual
verb, but with this clear element of antipathy or malefaction overtly present,
unlike the benefactive verbs. In other words, malefaction is probably more
marked than benefaction, so benefaction is the default unless a clearly
malefactive or antipathetic action is involved.
To
be a candidate for successful aspectual grammaticalization, a lexical verb must
contain at least one of the four elements of motion (or perhaps better, deixis), stasis,
containment/pertainment/obtainment, and malefaction/antipathy, with the added
complexity that these can combine in various ways to yield different surface
aspectual verbs, as well as complexities of meaning for individual aspectual markers
that are a challenge for my analysis.
Just to illustrate briefly, the location/static verb iru 'be (located)' when combined with
the containment verb koL are both
recruited to form, in combination, a durative/continuative aspectual marker kiTTiru. The metaphoric 'holding' of koL (its lexical meaning is 'hold,
contain') plus the metaphoric static 'being' of iru yield an aspectual marker expressing duration: 'holding the being, or continuing the holding.' Just as
in English, the verb 'hold' has been extended metaphorically, e.g. in telephone
usage, from its original meaning expressing 'holding' the telephone receiver
(i.e. not hanging up) while waiting for a line or a connection. 'Will you
hold?' thus means, not "Will you hold the receiver and not hang it
up?" but "Will you wait for a connection?" It is then further
extended to express the kind of waiting at airports when planes are in
'holding' pattern: waiting for a runway. The literal meaning of ‘holding’ is no longer
present (nobody's holding anything in their hand) but waiting, in particular
waiting in a pattern that gives priority to those airplanes that have been
there the longest, is the metaphoric meaning.
It is no accident that the verb koL
'hold, contain' involves originally holding something in the hand, in proximity
to the body (i.e. no further than arm's length). This defines the original perimeter of what
is one's personal space, and things entering or leaving this space, or the
action of leaving something, or remaining in proximity to it, and the verbs
that express this, are the crucial ones for recruitment as aspectual markers.
Aspectual
verbs in Tamil are on a kind of continuum from completely grammaticalized to
only-beginning-to-be-grammaticalized. This is evident from the fact that some
aspectual verbs (those I call completely grammaticalized) have complete freedom
of occurrence with other verbs—they can occur with any verb, transitive or
intransitive, with all persons, and with all tenses. They can be used with modals, in the negative,
in any context. The most completely
grammaticalized aspectual verb is (v)iDu,
which is based on the lexical verb viDu
'leave, let.' Furthermore, such completely aspectualized verbs also exhibit
phonological peculiarities, which is also an indicator (Hopper and Traugott) of
grammaticalization. In this case, the
initial [v] of the lexical verb is lost in ST, something that never happens at
word boundaries in Tamil, but is quite common word-internally.
Less
advanced on the scale of grammaticalization are aspectual verbs that can only
be used in certain contexts, e.g. only with transitive verbs, or only with
third person subjects, or only in the past tense, or perhaps have restrictions
on use with modal or negative verbs. The
less grammaticalized, the fewer instances of phonological peculiarity we also
witness, so that the AM vayyi 'future
utility' (based on the lexical verb vayyi
'put (for safekeeping)' does not exhibit v-deletion
(as does viDu) and can only occur
with transitive verbs. Fully-grammaticalized
AM's can even occur with their lexical analogs, e.g. naan ade viTTu-TTeen 'I completely left it; I finished it and got
it over with', whereas less completely grammaticalized AM's do not occur so
freely with their lexical analogs.
Verbs
that are the least grammaticalized are those that are only used in very limited
contexts, or are used only by certain speakers and/or dialects, or are only
used in a metaphoric sense some of the time. The verb kuDu 'give' is an example of this limitation; some speakers can use
it with other verbs freely, but many can or do not. There is a phrase sollikuDu meaning 'teach' ('say and give; give by saying') that
expresses this metaphoric usage well, and is used by many speakers. But beyond
this collocation many do not use it, or would consider this a lexicalization, a
'phrasal verb', but not an aspectual usage, so I relegate it to 'early
candidacy' as an aspect marker. If some
argue that it is an aspectual marker, it is so only in some dialects, or for
some speakers.[5]
Note
of course that the verb kuDu 'give'
in its basic meaning involves the use of the hands, and involves motion of an
object from the physical space of one person (the giver) into the physical
space of the recipient, and perhaps into his/her hands.[6]
The
hands are also involved in the verb taLLu
'push, shove' which is the source of the AM taLLu
'riddance; distributive'. The latter
meaning indicates that motion is metaphorically 'out of one's hands' and into
the hands or possession of 'unspecified recipients.'
4. Aspect and Modality. Lest it be assumed that some of the kinds of
meanings carried by aspectual markers are like modal verbs in other languages,
or that some of these semantic distinctions are in fact modal, it should be noted that Tamil has a full set of modal
verbs that express the kinds of notions that are expressed by English modals
such as ‘can, should, might, want, need,
etc.’ and that modal verbs in Tamil are syntactically different—they occur
after the infinitive, e.g. naan pooha-Num
(‘I to-go-want’) ‘I want to go’ so the use of the term ‘auxiliary’ (as in
‘aspectual auxiliary’) is one I usually abjure, in order to avoid the confusion
with modal auxiliaries. Aspectual verbs, in contrast, occur syntactically after
a so-called verbal (past) participle
(also referred to by some researchers as an ‘adverbial participle’ or AVP) so
in fact aspect and modality can both be expressed in the same sentence/verb
phrase, e.g. niinga vandukiTTirukka-Num (you come+durative+obligation) ‘You should
have been coming.’[7] Modal verbs occur as the last element of the
verb phrase, and are usually unmarked for person, number and gender. Aspectual markers, on the other hand, are
‘finite’ verbs as far as their morphology is concerned, and occur phrase-
finally unless something else, such as a modal, occurs.
4.1 What are the aspect
markers of Tamil? The verbs that can be treated as aspectual
are actually on a gradient scale (or ‘cline’) of grammaticalization; those that
are more completely grammaticalized (primarily aspectual and minimally
attitudinal) are (v)iDu `completive', kiTTiru `durative', vayyi `future utility', aahu `finality, expected result', vaa `iterative',
poo `change of state', koo `self-benefactive', iru1
`perfect', iru2 `result remains', and iru3
`epestemic.' The lexical analogs of
these aspectual markers are, respectively,
viDu `leave, let', koNDiru
[8] (no
lexical analog, but made up of elements of the lexical verb koLLu
and iru `be located'), vayyi `put away', aahu `become', vaa `come',
poo
`go', koL(Lu) `hold, contain', and iru `be
located.'
4.2 Attitudinal markers The aspect markers that are less completely
grammaticalized (i.e., are primarily attitudinal but nonetheless involve some
aspectual notion) are taLLu `distributive', tole `riddance',
pooDu `malicious intent', and some others that vary from dialect to
dialect, such as kuDu which has a
`benefactive' meaning in some dialects. The lexical analogs (or `source verbs')
of these aspectual markers are, respectively,
taLLu `push, shove', tole `(go to) ruin', pooDu `drop, plunk; put on (clothes).' The lexical
analog of kuDu is, not surprisingly, kuDu `give'.[9]
The
notion that attitudes or value judgments might be semantically related to
aspect may seem at first problematical, but as Johnson and Lakoff have shown
(1980), notions that are originally spatial or deictic, such as the
prepositions `up' and `down' are used metaphorically in many languages for
positive and negative meanings: things
that are `up' are (usually) good, and things that are `down' are (often) bad;
but we also see that these same prepositions have evolved (probably also via
metaphor) into aspectual notions in English, so that `up' as a verbal extender
has the meaning `completive' as in `eat up, use up, tie up, burn up' while
`down' used with the same or similar verbs has another meaning, perhaps not
clearly aspectual: `tie down, shut down,
pin down, burn down', etc. Similarly in Russian, the preposition u meaning
`in proximity to; in the possession of' (u m'en'a est' `I have' (`near-me is') is also used as an aspect
marker of completion or inchoativeness: znat' `to know' vs. uznat' `come to know,
realize'; snut' `to sleep' vs. usnut' `to fall asleep.'
An attempt to schematize these four elements as they
semantically characterize the lexical verbs in question is shown in Tables 1
and 2:
Table 1:
Lexical Verbs that serve as Sources for the Primarily Aspectual Markers:
|
|
Stasis |
Containment |
Deixis |
Antipathy |
|
viDu 'leave' |
- |
- |
+ |
- |
|
vayyi 'put, place' |
|
+ |
+ |
- |
|
kiTTiru (no lexical analog) |
+ |
+ |
- |
- |
|
iru 'be (located)' |
+ |
|
|
- |
|
koo 'contain, hold' |
+ |
+- |
|
+- |
|
aahu 'become' |
|
+ |
- |
- |
|
poo 'go' |
- |
- |
+ |
(+?) |
|
vaa 'come' (usu. LT) |
|
- |
+ |
- |
Table 2: Lexical Verbs that serve
as Sources for the Primarily Attitudinal Aspect Markers:
|
|
Stasis |
Containment |
Deixis |
Antipathy |
|
taLLu 'push' |
- |
- |
+ |
- |
|
pooDu 'drop, plunk' |
- |
+ |
+ |
+ |
|
kuDu 'give' |
- |
+ |
+ |
- |
|
tole '(go to) ruin' |
- |
- |
+ |
+ |
4.3.1 (v)iDu 'completive'. This aspectual verb contributes the semantic
notion that an action was, is, or will be complete or definite. It is similar
to aspectual verbs in other languages (Russian, Hindi, etc.) that impart
the notion of 'perfective' (not
perfect). Its lexical correlate is viDu 'leave, let.'[10]
Examples:
1. avan
pooyTTaan
he went-compl-png
'He went away; he's definitely gone'
2. naan vand-iDreen
I
come-compl-pres-png
'I
am definitely coming; I'll come for sure.'
3.
avane anuppuccuDu
him send-caus-compl-imp
'Send him away; get rid of him'
4.
ade saappiTTuTTeen
it-acc eat-compl-past-png
'I
ate it all up'
4.3.2 vayyi 'future utility'.
The
aspectual verb vayyi [11]
has a lexical analog vayyi 'take, put something somewhere for
safekeeping'. It is usually used with transitive main verbs only (since the
main verb vayyi is definitely transitive), but may
occur with some intransitive verbs, such
as siri
'laugh' (see example sentence 11 below). Other aspectual verbs (e.g.
(v)iDu ) may follow vayyi , but when present vayyi
always follows immediately after the
adverbial participle (AVP) of the main verb. The aspectual metaphor
conveyed by vayyi is the
notion that some action is performed because it will have (usually
useful or beneficial) future consequences; it is often translatable as 'in
reserve' or 'up', e.g. 'stock up (on)',
'read up (on something), 'study up (on something)', 'lay in (or up) a stock of (something)', which in English
also imply that an action is done with
an eye to future consequences, or
preemptively. In the examples below, the
glossed portion within square brackets
is not literally present in the Tamil sentence,
but is given as one or more of the consequences that the use of vayyi implies.
5.
taNNiire kuDiccu veppoom
water-acc drink fututil-fut-1pl
'We
will tank up on water' [We will
drink our fill of water so as to avoid
future thirst.]
6.
ammaa piLLengaLukku doose suTTu-veccaa
mother children-dat pancake heat-fututil-past-3sgfm
'The mother made dosas for the children [to eat later].' 'The mother cooked up
some dosas [to have ready] for the
children [to eat later].'
7. pooliiskiTTe edeyaavadu oLari- vekkaadee
police-to something-or-other babble-fututil-neg-imp
'Don't go blabbing anything to the police
[Make sure to take precautions to avoid getting yourself into even more hot water later].'
8. naan naaye kaTTi-vekkalle