Cagliari, Italy  15-18 September 2003

ALT V Conference

Frans Plank

Delocutive verbs in typological perspective.
frans.plank@uni-konstanz.de

Delocutive verbs can be defined as derived verbs which mean 'to perform a culturally recognized act, to do with the meaning or force of X, by saying "X" (to someone) or uttering something to the effect of "X"'.  'X' is a variable for derivational bases ranging over the following types of things that can be said or uttered: (i) pronouns of address; (ii) nouns of (abusive and other) address (proper names, titles, epithets); (iii) words or phrases specialized for performing complementary dialogic speech-acts, in particular (a) words for answering yes/no questions and also for responding to commands ('yes', 'no', 'perhaps'), (b) words for asking questions (i.e., interrogative pronouns), (c) words for reacting to assertions (such as 'but', 'okay', 'uh-huh'); (iv) expressions for performing routine social acts, such as greeting, well-wishing, thanking, warning, permitting and forbidding, supplicating, swearing, cursing, chanting, getting someone's attention, and maintaining contact between speaker and addressee (on either side); (v) expressives, namely (a) sound-related interjections or ideophones, (b) conventionalized reproductions of human or animal sounds or calls; (vi) features of pronunciation characteristic of dialectal or other linguistic varieties or of individual speech peculiarities. To illustrate three of these base types, (i), (iv), and (vi):  German DU-Z-EN, derived from the nominative/appellative form of the 2nd person singular pronoun of informal address by suffix -Z, means 'to address someone by "du"' (rather than by formal "Sie"), hence 'to be on informal terms with someone thus addressed'; Latin SALUT-ARE, zero-derived from the salutation SALUS!, originally a wish for a person's welfare, the noun's meaning being 'health', means 'to say "salus!" to someone', hence 'to wish someone well, greet someone';  Russian A-K-A-T', derived from [a] by suffix -K, means 'to speak a dialect where unstressed /o/ is pronounced as [a]'.

Although originally identified as such and illustrated exclusively from Indo-European languages by Debrunner (1956) and Benveniste (1958), delocutives are not confined to this family.  They are not universal either.  Taking a wider perspective, the aim of this paper is to outline the possibilities for crosslinguistic variation and change in delocutive formations, derivational and other, and thus to stimulate further typological and diachronic research on this under­investigated category.

 Special emphasis will be given (i) to situating delocutives within the wider domains of quotation, appellation, and sound/noise reproduction; (ii) to clarifying the semantics and pragmatics of delocutives vis-à-vis other categories of verb formation;  (iii) to determining the morphological status of delocutives (as regular or playful/expressive morphology);  (iv) to distinguishing the parameters along which delocutive formations can vary with regard (a) to possible formal and semantic types of bases and (b) to possible types of exponents (often zero derivation; sometimes reduplication or gemination; frequently affixes, though rarely, if ever, dedicated to just this purpose; frequently light-verb/complex-predicate syntactic constructions incipiently grammaticalized);  (v) to getting some preliminary idea of the world-wide genealogical and areal incidence of delocutives and their subtypes in their various derivational and syntactic manifestations (with expressive-based delocutives being most widespread, but with otherwise a great deal of variation even among neighbours and next-of-kin);  (vi) to identifying the possible origins of delocutive forms (in semantic reanalyses or extensions of other verb-deriving morphology, especially general-purpose, transitivizing, causativizing, aspectual/actional, or intensifying; in the grammaticalization of quotative, factitive, causative, or transfer verbs, often a verb covering both saying and doing; or also in borrowing);  and (vii) to forecasting the possible fate of delocutives (including their semantic reanalysis as non-delocutive).