The Semantics of Aktionsart enclitics
Aktionsart enclitics fall into five semantic groups:
– manner of action, which involves breaking or cutting;
– directionals, which often combine information about the type of action, e.g. brusque or forceful movement;
– extent of action or state;
– a broad category of associated action:17 to do something while doing something else, or while something else takes place (two events taking place simultaneously), e.g. step on something and feel a sharp pang of pain; do something early, wag one’s tail while rubbing oneself against someone in a friendly way (of an animal), etc;
– type of object or location, e.g. clean the open space of a garden, or put something onto a flat surface.
There are quite a few restrictions on which verbs combine with which enclitics. The Aktionsart enclitics which refer to ‘breaking’ are used with verbs of breaking or cutting. The enclitic-holo ‘spill (water)’ is used with verbs which describe activities associated with water, e.g.-anu ‘take liquid out of a vessel, e.g. canoe or pan’, or-nua ‘spill liquid’. The enclitic-liphe ‘stumble or occasion ally step on something and then let it go’ and-seku ‘slip all of a sudden’ are used only with motion verbs (e.g.-phua ‘step’,-kani ‘walk’).
Some Aktionsart enclitics are even more idiosyncratic in their meanings and consequently in the verbs they combine with. For instance,-khuli ‘rub against someone in a friendly way’ (e.g. a cat, or a dog) is apparently used only with the verb-peta ‘for an animal to wag its tail in greeting’. In (26), this verb is used to describe a ‘greeting’ customary for mythical snake-people.
The clitic-yali ‘spread over flat surface’ occurs only with-ni ‘do’ or-wena ‘spill, scatter’, illustrated in (27).
A certain degree of semantic change goes together with the grammaticalization of Aktionsart enclitics.
There is no semantic difference between a verb when used independently and when used as a component of a serial verb construction, i.e. between stages I and II in Chart 1 and 2. Enclitics which do have a corresponding verb may display a slight semantic difference between stages I and II (independent verb and a component of a SVC), on the one hand, and stages III and IV (modifier verb and enclitic), on the other hand. This difference is best described as semantic specification (in the sense of Traugott 1988) whereby one component of the source remains unaffected, but the meaning becomes more complex. This semantic specification is largely unpredictable. For instance, kahwi as a verb means ‘wake up early in the morning’ and the corresponding enclitic means ‘do early in the morning’. The source verb hala means ‘be open’; the corresponding enclitic refers to spreading and extending onto an ‘open space’. In examples like (31) below it is used almost as a verbal classifier, similarly to the ‘areal’ prefix in Athabascan languages (see Thompson 1993): it refers to the shape of the chest (as an ‘open surface’).
The same morpheme used as a verb (with cross-referencing prefixes) and as an enclitic or modifier (without cross-referencing prefixes) differ syntactically. A verb has its independent arguments, while the enclitic or a modifier does not; consequently, the former describes the action of S (SA/SO), while the corresponding enclitic or a modifier describe the action and may apply to an absolutive argument of the main verb — S, as in (28) or, more often, O, as seen in (18) above.
The difference between the same root when used as a modifier verb and as an enclitic (between stages III and IV in Chart 1; between stages II and III in Chart 2; and between stages I and II in Chart 3) relates to pragmatic organization of the narrative.
Compare (17) and (18) above, for enclitics with a corresponding active verb and (22) and (23) above, for those without.
The difference between these pairs is determined by whether the particular aspect of the action is contrasted to something else or not. The direction, or the manner of action, has to be contrastive for the verbal root to be used as an independent modifier. Consequently, in (22) the direction, ‘into water’, is contrasted to the previous location of a magic fish on the surface; in (23) no contrast is implied. In (17), the action of ‘unsticking’ the thighs of a dead body is contrastive, because of its unusual character and the physical force it involved (as explicated by the narrator, Graciliano Brito). In (18), the kind of action (‘unsticking’) does not imply any particular effort: the son of the ancestor turned into a sort of fish which usually clings to the bottom of canoes, and ‘unsticking’ them is what one usually does. Relatively independent morphemes — i.e., verbal modifiers — are more contrastive than dependent enclitics.
This fits in with the notion of ‘pragmatic enrichment’ and ‘pragmatic bleaching’ in grammaticalization (see Hopper and Traugott 1993:87). The more grammaticalized the element is, the less pragmatic effect — such as contrastive ness — it carries. This is why enclitics are less pragmatically ‘marked’, that is, less contrastive, than the same morphemes used independently.
The enclitics which have no corresponding verb in the language undergo optional segmental phonological reduction in rapid speech; for example, final-ana reduces to-ã. Thus,-khana ‘away’ becomes-khã, and-pana ‘all’ becomes-pã. Most of the verbs listed in Table 2 are rarely used and are not even familiar to all the speakers, e.g.-seku ‘slip over’ and-kusu ‘be shaken’. Speakers who do not know these verbs nevertheless use the forms derived from them as prefixless modifiers and enclitics (that is, as stages III and IV in Chart 1). The verb-yali ‘cover’ is rarely used by itself; it tends to be accompanied by the Aktionsart enclitic-pana ‘all’. The analysis of the text corpus also shows that the verbal roots listed in Table 2 are more often used as enclitics or prefixless modifiers (stages III and IV) than as verbs (stages I and II).
The fairly idiosyncratic meaning of most Aktionsart enclitics relates to the fact that they most probably arose as the result of calqueing Tucano verb compounding structures — see §3 and §4.4.
