Development of TAM categories in Turkic: feeling free in the deterministic system
Pavel Grashchenkov
Turkic languages have about two dozens of verbs that can be used either as lexical verbs or
as auxiliaries expressing TAM categories. The paper discusses the process of grammatical
function development in such verbs. I will consider details of syntactic reanalysis that
underlie novel TAM items appearance and take a closer look on the grammatical semantics
of novel auxiliaries. I will also concern a question of whether these changes were structural
or semantic by nature.
1. Introduction
I will use the term “grammaticalization” without any ideological background:
“grammaticalization” will mean just the process of emergence of new grammatical
elements. In this paper grammaticalization is treated as a syntactic process but the only
reason for its syntactic nature is that I consider evolution of a syntactic construction. I will
not touch upon the problem of whether a grammaticalization is a complex phenomenon
including phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic changes or whether there are
different types of changes and each of them can be called “grammaticalization”, see
Newmeyer (2001) for the discussion.
There are from twenty to thirty verbs in Modern Turkic that can be used either as
independent lexical items or as TAM auxiliaries. As regular verbs they do not differ from
another verbal lexemes. Being auxiliaries, they have fixed position just after the meaning
verb, share the stress with it and express significantly different meaning, see Johanson
(1995), Erdal (2004) a.o. Sometimes such items give rise to verbal morphemes with TAM
functions. I will propose the detailed scenario for the shift from lexical verb into TAM
markers and discuss some aspects of new grammatical meanings with respect to the source
verbs.
Then, there are two main trends in historical syntactic researches. According to the
first one, see Heine et al. (1991), Haspelmath (1998), Traugott (2003), Bybee (2003),
Hopper & Traugott (2003) a.o., grammaticalization is driven mostly by semantic bleaching
that is the reason for its vague, gradual nature. As stated in Haspelmath (1999):1062 “Thus,
in my model it is not so much that semantic bleaching and phonological reduction go hand
Proceedings of SinFonIJA3, 2011
Pavel Grashchenkov
On the discreteness of grammar (change)
in hand, but semantic generalization is in a sense the cause of the other processes of
grammaticalization.”
Under the structural treatment of grammaticalization, started in Lightfoot (1979), the
driving force of grammatical change is restructuring of syntactically ambiguous
constructions that leads to changes in the grammatical system, see Harris & Campbell
(1995), Roberts & Roussou (2003) a.o. This perspective presupposes that changes are
discrete since they are dependent on concrete syntactic constructions and vocabulary items
on the one hand and give rise to the pre-defined grammatical elements on the other.
I will mostly adhere the structural scenario here but will however compare the two
approaches discussing development of Turkic auxiliaries.
2. Auxiliary Verb Construction in Turkic
2.1. Function of converbs
The combination of a converb and a finite form in modern Turkic is regularly used to
introduce coordinated or multiple events. All Turkic verbs freely participate in such
constructions. In the examples below we see two events both of which can be either
simultaneous or follow one after another:
(1) Tubalar
a.
Wasja
uxta-p
Vasya
sleep-CONV
i. ‘Vasya stood when sleeping.’
ii. ‘Vasya slept and (then) stood.’
b.
Wasja
uxta-p
Vasya
sleep-CONV
i. ‘Vasya sang when sleeping.’
ii. ‘Vasya slept and (then) sang.’
Shluinskij (2006.b)
tur-dy
stay-PST
kajla-dy
sing-PST
2.2. Auxiliary Verb Constructions
Turkic auxiliary verb (AV hereafter) constructions have the following properties: (i) they
are created as a sequence of two or more verbs, the lexical verb coming first and the AV
follows it; (ii) such verb chain can not be split; (iii) it has the common phrasal stress; (iv) the
meaning of such construction is defined by the first, lexical item; (vi) only verbs from a very
limited group can serve as a AV.
In the example below verbs ‘stay’ and ‘see’ create AV constructions that introduce
the action duration and possibility (correspondingly):
2
Pavel Grashchenkov
(2) Tubalar
a.
Wasja
uxta-p
Vasya
sleep-CONV
i. ‘Vasya stood when sleeping.’
ii. ‘Vasya slept and (then) stood.’
iii. ‘Vasya was sleeping.’
?
b.
čaška
tül-üp
cup
fall-CONV
‘The cup could fall.’
Shluinskij (2006.b)
tur-dy
stay-PST
kör-di
see-PST
In (2.a), that repeats (1.a), we provide one more reading available for it apart of (i)
and (ii) in (1.a). Under the reading (iii), the verb tur-, ‘stand’, loses its lexical meaning and
has a function of tense / aspect marking. In (2.b) the verb kör-, ‘see’, denotes an epistemic
probability for an action with this subject.
(2.b) has an inanimate subject used with the verb ‘see’ that also supports the idea of
loss of initial lexical meaning when this verb used as an auxiliary. Another evidence for the
fact that AVs lose their meanings and serve just as TAM markers can be seen in the example
below where the AV expresses negation for the event introduced by the lexical verb (olu-,
‘die’)1, see also past tense reference on (2) that is attributed to the meaning of the lexical
verbs:
(3) Azerbayjani
kitab
jandyrylyrsa, šairin
əsərləri məhv
book
if.burned
poet.GEN
works
‘Even if a book is burned, the poet’s work doesn’t die.’
Azerbayjani (1971)
olu-p
ket-mi-r
die-CONV
go-NEG-3
2.3. Sources and grammatical outcomes of AVs
The earliest data observed in Old Turkic show that even a thousand years ago2 AVs already
existed in the language and had more or less the same shapes and meanings as they have
nowadays. In spite of this fact, we can argue that the process of AV grammaticalization can
be clearly tracked down, see for instance, Johanson (1995) a.o.
In brief, the pathways of grammaticalization can be stated as following. Embedded
clauses3 always share at least their subjects with the main clause:
(4) Kazakh
[Nurlan
Nurlan
koldin maηynda
lake near
V1
[suga қara-p ]
water look-Conv
V2
tұr-dy]
stay-Pst
As was noted by an anonymous reviewer, the AV “carries it (=negation, PG), not expresses it (which may be
weaker evidence)”. But Turkic indeed have a negative counterpart of the -p converb, but in the construction
under issue only -p converbs can be used, so negation should be expressed by the serial, not lexical verbs.
2
Old Turkic Documents can be attributed to the period of VII – XIII cc.
3
V1 clause, since Turkic is strictly head-final.
1
3
On the discreteness of grammar (change)
‘Looking at the water, Nurlan stayed near the lake.’
Such configurations are not easy to parse, see Hawkins (1994) a.o. To recognize that
‘near the lake’ is attributed to ‘stay’, the hearer should wait while the embedded clause
finishes. The clause headed by V1 should be parsed first and only then the hearer can attach
‘near the lake’ to its host. The more material we have in such sentences, the more
significantly increases parsing difficulty. The early closure becomes actual, that calls to
syntactic reinterpretation:
(5) Kazakh
V1
[Nurlan
[koldin maηynda
suga қara-p ]
Nurlan
lake near
water look-Conv
‘Looking at the water near the lake, Nurlan stayed.’
V2
tұr-dy]
stay-Pst
In (5) the dependent stuff is already attached to V1. The next step is whole sentence
reanalysis. The subject and all other material become attributed not to the V2 item but to the
whole V1+V2 complex:
(6) Kazakh
V1
[Nurlan
koldin maηynda
suga қara-p
Nurlan
lake near
water look-Conv
‘Nurlan was looking at the water near the lake.’
V2
tұr-dy]
stay-Pst
It is crucial for the latter switch that V1+V2 complex was ambiguous with another
monoclausal structure. In Old Turkic there was an instance of a grammaticalized verb,4 är-,
‘to be’ that could be preceded by different verb forms: preterit, -mIš-nominalizations, madOk, -gAy etc, and had different grammatical functions depending on this, Erdal (2004).
This verb can also follow -p converbs and “appears to convey post-terminal meaning”, Erdal
(2004:252):
(7) (Old) Uygur
olar burxan kutïn
bulu-p
they Budhahood
become-Conv
‘after they will have reached Budhahood, ...’
ärtmištä
be
basa
after
Erdal (2004:401)
anta…
Thus, the combination “converbial V1 + main V2” had an equivalent among
analytical verbal forms and could in principle be (re-)interpreted as a “verb + auxiliary”.
According to Roberts & Roussou (2003), this is a stimulus that helps to reinterpret current
structure into the novel one and thus supports V2 grammaticalization to auxiliary.
After the Old Turkic period, Modern Turkic languages proceeded further with
grammaticalization and turned some AVs into affixes, see novel Perfective, Present and
4
Such forms with auxiliary-only verbs (like edi) are even more productive in nowdays Turkic, cf.: keli-p edi,
come-Conv AUX, ‘to have come’.
4
Pavel Grashchenkov
Praesens Historicum markers below (note that Kyrgyz and Turkmen had not much influence
on each other and developed the Present marker from the verb ‘lie’ independently):
(8)
a.
b.
с.
d.
pary-b-ys
go-CONV-PFV
bara-žata-myn
come-PRES-1.SG
gel-jar-yn
come-PRES-1.SG
bere-p.tir-men
come-PRES.HIST-1.SG
-is (Perf)  us- (‘send’)
Khakass
Khakass (1953)
-žata- (Pres)  žata- (‘lie’)
Kyrgyz
(http://Kyrgyz.lugovsa.net)
-jat- (Pres)  jor- (‘move’)
Turkmen
SIGTY-M (1988)
-tir- (PresHist)  tur- (‘stay)
Tyva
Tyva (1961)
This is the way how embedded clause construction gave rise to novel grammatical
categories in Turkic:
(9)
Lexical items  1st step  Verbs with grammatical functions  2nd step  TAM markers
Thus, the emergence of new TAM categories in Turkic started in the Proto-Turkic
period as lexical to auxiliary switch and proceeds nowadays as auxiliary to morphology
switch. The rest of the paper considers in detail the first step in this process and discuss
particular conditions under which lexical verbs in Turkic acquired auxiliary functions. I will
concentrate on which novel grammatical meanings have been developed and how they
correspond to initial lexical meanings of verbs.
5
On the discreteness of grammar (change)
2.4. AVs as functional head fillers
Taking into account the grammaticalization process described above, I propose the
following scenario. A new role of auxiliary was possible due to the fact that the clause
structure had functional head positions that had not been filled by overt material and served
a potential landing site for V2:
(10) Grammaticalized AVs end up in functional head positions
FuncnP
…P
…P
VP
Su/DO
…
…
Func2P
Func1P
Funcn
Func2
Func1
V2
V1
So, in this section I proposed how the novel TAM markers arose in Turkic. In brief,
syntactic reanalysis is a mechanism that eroded clause boundaries and let regular verbs
occupy functional head positions. This was accompanied by the reanalysis of the main
clause internal material as attached to the embedded verb and supported by the existing
models of lexical plus auxiliary combinations. In what follows I will discuss how and which
new TAM meanings appeared.
I argue that this scenario is much more plausible as opposed to the “semantic
bleaching” approach. If the semantic bleaching was prerequisite to reanalysis, we would
expect to find it not only in ‘V1 + V2’ configurations but in other instances where AV are
used. However, this is not the case: in the chaining example below the verb ‘stay’ clearly
lacks grammatical meaning:
(11) Kazakh
V1
Nurlan
suga қara-p
koldin maηynda
Nurlan
water look-Conv
lake near
i. ‘Nurlan stood near the lake and looked at the water.’
*ii. ‘Nurlan was looking at the water near the lake.’
V2
tұr-dy
stay-Pst
3. Meaning and functions of novel grammatical items
6
Pavel Grashchenkov
What we observe in the result of AV appearance is: (i) the array of lexical meanings
participating is AV development; (ii) the array of grammatical functions served by AVs in
Modern Turkic. I am going to implement a kind of set theoretic analysis of the (elements of
the) two arrays.
What are expectations concerning the volume of the arrays and the relations between
elements in the arrays? With respect to the volume, an array can represent an open or closed
set of elements. As for relations among elements, every element from the first array can
correspond to a single or multiple elements in the second array. This is exemplified in the
figure below:
(12)
Array 1 (Lexical Meaning)
A, B 
C
D
…
Array 2 (Grammatical Function)
 A’
 C’
 D’, E’
…
In our case the Array 1 will be represented by the set of lexical meanings and the
Array 2 – by the set of grammatical functions. As for the volume, both grammatical and
lexical arrays can potentially constitute either open or closed sets of meanings. Then, manyto-one relations between the two arrays will create synonymous AVs, one-to-one relations
will create non-synonymous AVs.
Below I will discuss what shapes took the interplay between the lexical and the
grammatical arrays.
7
On the discreteness of grammar (change)
3.1. Which verbs become auxiliaries?
The structural approach to grammaticalization proposed in 2. allows us to make the
following generalization. As far as AVs arose from the main clause heads, we can argue that
the best candidates for them were matrix predicates and predicates, denoting background
actions.
Indeed, both types of items are met very often among Turkic AV. Thus, the first
couple of auxiliaries below exemplifies matrix AVs and another couple – regular
background action predicates.
(13) Tubalar
čaška tülü-p
kör-di
cup
fall-Conv
see-Pst
‘The cup could (~tried to) fall.’
(14) Kyrgyz
balam
oku-p
child.my
read-Conv
‘My child can read.’
Shluinskij (2006.b)
bil-di
know-Pst
(15) Kyrgyz
Kurmanbek süzü-p
žat-at
Kurmanbek swim-Conv lie-Prs
‘Kurmanbek is swimming.’
(16) Chuvash
xer
ača-n
piče šyš’-sa
girl
child-Gen
face swell-Conv
‘The girl’s face was swelling.’
tă-č-ĕ
stay-Pfv-3
However, the structural approach says nothing about how a new grammatical
meaning depends on the lexical semantics of the source item. Having in mind just structural
pattern one can not predict, why, for instance the first couple of examples above have modal
meaning and the second one have durative meaning.
Considering semantics of source items, one can find regular correspondences among
it and the novel grammatical categories: verbs of position and non-directional movement
grammaticalize into durative / progressive markers, verbs of directional movement – into
resultative markers, perception verbs into modals and so on.
Under the semantic or functional treatment, we can speculate that verbs like ‘know’
often have additional meaning ‘know how to do something’ and the verbs like ‘stay’ are
often used not to describe the exact position but to underlie the long duration of another
process (cf. Piles of rubble where houses stood and smoke rising, not from bombs but from
cracks in the ground feeding oxygen to the subterranean coal fire5) etc.6
5
http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/Fire-in-the-hole_Kristie-Betts.htm
8
Pavel Grashchenkov
3.2. (Un)restricted meaning and functions
There is a general agreement on the fact that the major lexical classes constitute open-type
sets of meanings. If so, from purely semantic point of view we would expect that no
semantic restrictions are imposed on grammaticalization. On the contrary, the structural
approach prescribes a limited list of meanings in accordance to the fact that the amount of
(grammatical features of) functional heads is restricted. Thus, if we address the list of
meanings described by the AV from the point of view of the set theory, it would create an
open set from the semantic perspective and a closed set according to the structural one.
However, meanings like ‘to do something staying / coming somewhere / seeing
something’ are not attested. In spite of the fact that the verbs ‘stay’, ‘come’, ‘see’ are AVs,
their meanings changed into those similar to English progressive (‘stay’), perfective
(‘come’) and the expression of attempts (‘see’).
But what kind of semantics do we observe in the AV domain? We can detect the
following most regular grammatical meanings among Turkic AVs: duration and perfectivity
(aspectual), attemptive and possibillitive (modal), and applicativity. Let me briefly
exemplify them all.
One type of aspectual meaning regularly expressed by AVs deals with action
duration. Lexemes used in this function are: position verbs ‘stay’, ‘lie’, ‘sit’ and the verb of
undirected movement, bar- ‘move’:
(17) Kazakh
Medvedev
kazakša
sөyle-p
Medvedev
in.Kazakh
speak-CONV
‘Medvedev is speaking Kazakh.’
(18) Chuvash
xer
ača-n
piče šyš’-sa
girl
child-GEN
face swell-CONV
‘The girl’s face was swelling.’
otyr
sit.3.SG
tă-č-ĕ
stay-PFV-3
Different instances of perfective meaning are provided by verbs of arrival / departure
like ‘go’, ‘leave’, ‘come’, ‘remain’ and others or verbs of change of possession / location
like ‘put’, ‘send’, etc:
As the anonymous reviewer pointied it: “… the verb that grammaticalizes into an ability modal head is 'know'
and the verb that grammaticalizes into a durative aspect head is a posture verb (e.g. 'stand'). On the ForS
[=structural – P.G.] approach, is there any reason that it is exactly 'know' that becomes an ability modal head
and a posture verb that becomes a durative aspect head?”
6
9
On the discreteness of grammar (change)
(19) Kyrgyz
Žer
basyp al-uu
kurču-gan
muktaždyk-tan
soil
push take-NMN
surround-PFCT need-ABL
‘The seizure of lands happened (~arrived) due to constant need.’
keli-p
come-CONV
čyk-ty.
go-PAST
(20) Kazakh
avtomobil'
žoldary
basķarmasy-nyŋ
bastyħy
auto
ways
department-gen
head
Abay,
Ayagөz
audan-dar-yna
kelі-p
ket-tі.
Abay,
Ayagөz
region-PL-DAT
come-CONV leave-PAST
‘The chief of the road department (has) visited Abay and Ayagoz regions.’
(21) Tyva
Ača-m
zavod-ka
ürgülčü
ažylda-p
Father-1.SG factory-DAT all.time
work-CONV
‘My father has always been working at the factory.’
Tyva (1961)
kel-gen
come-PFCT
Verbs ‘take’ and ‘give’ are used across Turkic in the applicative function. ‘Take’
introduces an action benefactive for the subject and ‘give’ denotes benefactivity for
somebody else’s sake:
(22) Kyrgyz
Ežem žigit-ke
bijle-p
ber-di
sister guy-DAT
dance-CONV gave-PST
‘The sister danced for (some) guy.’
(23) Kyrgyz
Kurmanbek koj
soju-p
al-dy
Kurmanbek ram cut-CONV
take-PST
‘Kurmanbek cut (=slaughtered) a ram for himself.’
Two more cases are modal meanings of ability and attempt. Ability is expressed by
the verb ‘know’:
(24) Kyrgyz
bala-m
oku-p
child-1.SG
read-CONV
‘My child can read.’
bil-di
know-PAST
Attempts to do something are regularly introduced in Turkic by the AV ‘see’ and
sometimes – by ‘show’. Below we find the situation in which the causer tried to realize
some action (but whether she succeeded is unclear):
10
Pavel Grashchenkov
(25) Tubalar
Maša čočko-ny
čeri-p
Masha piglet-ACC
chase-CONV
‘Masha tried to chase the piglet away.’
Shluinskij (2006.b)
kör-di
see-PST
Thus, Turkic AVs grammaticalize only those meanings that are regularly found in
the languages of the world, namely aspectual (perfective and durative), modal (attemptive
and possibillitive), and applicative categories. No meanings like ‘to do something staying /
coming somewhere / seeing something’ arose in Turkic AV in spite of the fact that these
very lexical items were used in AV grammaticalization. The novel grammatical meanings
attested among Turkic AVs are perfectly consistent with the functional heads semantics, see,
for instance Cinque (1999, 2007); Cinque & Rizzi (2009); Pylkkanen (2002) a.o.
So, it seems that structural approach is more accurate here since any lexical item
converted to AV acquires specific grammatical meaning that has been previously reported to
be a part of UG.
3.3. (In)finite Process of Grammaticalization
In this section I consider the question of whether the grammaticalization process
stopped in Turkic AV or it still proceeds resulting in new AVs with new meanings.
As mentioned in Marcel Erdal’s description of Old Turkic, see Erdal’s (2004:245):
“When converbs are used as first elements in analytical constructions, the products always
express actionality, intention, ability or version.” All these functions are just those we
observed in the previous section for the AVs semantics in Modern Turkic. Moreover, the list
of auxiliary remains close to the original during the last thousand years and we find the very
same set of grammaticalized verbs (with slight deviations) in different Modern Turkic, cf.
(26.a) for Tyva and (26.b) for Kyrgyz below:
(26)
a.
b.
al-, bar-, ber-, düš-, kal-, kag-, kör-, kel-, olur-, tur-, čit-, …
Tyva (1961)
al-, bar-, ber-, tuš-, kal-, koj-, kör-, kel-, oltur-, sal-, tur-, žiber-, … Kyrgyz (1985)7
What we see thus is that neither new grammatical meanings arose during the last
thousand years, nor new lexical items developed grammatical function. It is a bit strange
taking into account that the source construction for the AV did not become less productive –
the use of converbs is still the main tool for expressing event coordination in Turkic.
If grammaticalization is driven mostly by semantics, it is strange that no new AV
arise when the source construction itself did not loose productivity. This situation can be
7
Some items are not the same in these two languages, as was pointed me by the anonymous reviewer. This is
true, but if we consider the broader list of Turkic, we will see that some items misses sporadically rather than
appear sporadically (this is to say, a verb is present in 90% of Turkic languages and is absent in 10% of them).
This argues for the fact that some languages have lost this of that AV rather than develop any from the Old
Turkic era.
11
On the discreteness of grammar (change)
better described under the structural approach. We can suppose that some grammatical
“lacunas”, namely, the absence of an overt marker for some feature supports the changes.
So, one can argue that grammaticalization should stop when the features matrix is
“satisfied” to some extent.8
To summarize: no new items or grammatical meanings arose in Turkic AV that is
more consistent with the structural treatment of grammaticalization and is a bit hard to
describe in purely semantic terms.
3.4. Synonymous AVs
In terms of set theory, synonymy is a situation when more than one element from one set
(lexicon in our case) corresponds to a single element in another set (the domain of
grammatical meaning). Indeed, as we saw in section 5, many lexical items seem to provide
the same grammatical meaning. Perfective and durative aspectual domains are the best
examples here.
But how can we make sure that the AV with these items are synonymous?
Grammatical descriptions are usually quite vague and address such AV meanings as “long
lasted actions”, “actions in progress” etc. To show that we really observe synonymy among
AVs, let me consider verbs with the durative functions in Kyrgyz and Kazakh.
In both languages (as in the most other Turkic) the durative meaning is provided by
verbs ‘sit’, ‘stay’, ‘lie’ and ‘move’. Below I present results of a quick corpus study of such
verb on the text arrays of 700 thousand words for Kyrgyz and 1.7 million words for Kazakh.
After creating these text collections I made a search of the sequences of two adjacent
converbs followed by a auxiliary verb. The question was whether we observe sequences of
two verbs from the durative domain (for instance, ‘sit’ and ‘stay’, ‘sit’ and ‘lie’, ‘sit’ and
‘move’ etc.) If we do, this would doubt the synonymy of these items in AV function.
The results are present in the table below. As we can see, co-occurrence of different
durative AVs are extremely rare that can argue in favor of identity of their grammatical
meaning and function.
(27)
Durative Avs
first AV second AV in total co-occur
žat
‘lie’,
žür
‘move’, 183
148
331
1
Kyrgyz
tur ‘stay’, өltүrүp ‘sit’
otyr ‘sit’, žür ‘move’, tur ‘stay’ 167
189
356
6
Kazakh
Thus, the grammatical synonymy is what we really find among Turkic AVs.9
I’m not aware of any research on how many grammatical categories can a language possess. As was
noted be an anonymous reviewer, “people working in the “cartographic" program argue for tens if not
hundreds of distinct grammatical categories.” Turkic has about two or three dozens of AVs, so in sum with
regular, morphological categories, “tens” level is satisfied indeed.
9
As was noted by an anonymuos reviewer, “even if the verbs are not synonymous we probably don't have to
expect them to cooccur… Morphemes that realize heads from the same domain (say, mood) but not the same
8
12
Pavel Grashchenkov
If then semantic changes are a driving force for grammaticalization, it is not quite
clear why semantic simplification of verbs ‘sit’, ‘stay’, ‘lie’ and ‘move’ results in one and
the same grammatical meaning. It would be much more likely from the functional views that
each verb creates its own semantic outcome, no matter how “abstract” or “concrete”
meaning such an outcome must have.
From the structural point of view we can explain the fact that different lexical items
have turned into the same grammatical element: the real driving force for all these verbs is a
gap in a feature matrix. The feature {durative} of the aspectual functional head “attracts”
verbs like ‘sit’, etc. to be an overt marker of it.
If we look again at the table above, it is also hard to explain from semantic or
functional perspectives, why the two verbs (even with the same grammatical function) can
not co-occur in spite of their relative frequency in AV constructions.
At the same time, non-coocurence of the items with the same grammatical functions
follows quite naturally from the structural approach: all the verbs ‘sit’, ‘stay’, ‘lie’ and
‘move’ occupies the same position and thus are mutually excluded.
To summarize: AV synonymy is a problem for the semantic or functional approach,
since it is not quite clear how and why the semantic drift move different verbs in the same
direction. Moreover, synonymous AVs are in complementary distribution that can be
interpreted as a result of the concurrence for the same position in the structure.
4. Conclusion
The process of grammaticalization lexical verbs in Turkic into novel TAM markers acted as
following: the embedded clauses were reanalysed as auxiliary constructions and then some
auxiliaries turned to morphemes. I tried to show that it was syntactic reanalysis and not the
semantic bleaching that gave rise to multiple auxiliary items in Modern Turkic.
As for the structural vs semantic perspectives on grammaticalization, we found that
the semantic approach can easily accommodate the fact that there are good correlations
between the semantic type of a verb and a grammatical meaning expressed by this verb as
auxiliary.
The structural view on the semantic changes can explain the following facts:
(i) many AVs are either matrix predicates or verbs denoting background actions;
(ii) AVs have been derived as a closed set of grammatical meanings that corresponds
to grammatical meanings attested in the language of the world;
(iii) grammaticalization stopped at some moment in spite of the productivity of
converb plus finite verb construction, since the system of features got “satisfied”;
values sometimes can't cooccur (e.g. *John must can go), and even when they can, it may not happen very
often in actual use, and relying on grammaticality judgements may be safer.” I surely agree with it, moreover,
some time ago I have been started to research the coocurence possibilities of AV both on text corpora and
native speaker judgments. It appears that constraints on coocurence are even stronger: not only for instance
two durative or two modal AVs are not allowed with the same lexical verb, but even durative and some other
aspect serials are not ok, etc. AV pairs are not very often, but not totally excluded. One of the most intersting
phenomenon here is that when more than one serial allowed in a clause, such items seem to form a hierarchy,
see Bridges (2008) for similar research.
13
On the discreteness of grammar (change)
(iv) synonymy is widespread among AVs, since more than one verb may target the
same functional head.
The claim is that in case of AV reanalysis “spoils the program” of normal
functioning of lexical items. They thus have little free choice and their future is quite
determined.
5. Acknowledgements
I’m very grateful for my good friend in Kyrgyzstan, Fatima Sulejmanovna, for her long and
careful work on the Kyrgyz data. Many theoretical topics of the paper was discussed with
Sergei Tatevosov, I would thank him and Ekaterina Lyutikova and Vita Markman for their
help. I’m also very grateful to Andrey Shluinskij, who supplied me with many Turkic data
carefully collected and analyzed by him during his field studies. Comments and corrections
of the anonymous reviewers were also extremely useful and helped me to significantly
reconsider the paper. All faults are mine.
Pavel Grashchenkov, Institute of Oriental Studies, [email protected], gra-paul.nm.ru
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