WA Friday Lectures (now called WA Friday Lunch Talks) are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. They are usually held in room 316A on Fridays at 1:30 PM. Each talk is of 30 minutes (+ 10 minutes for discussion).
Old English cyme and the Proto-Indo-European root aorist optative in Germanic
prof. UAM dr Ronald Kim
Department of Older Germanic Languages, WA UAM
Although it has been agreed since the 19th century that the Germanic subjunctive continues the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) optative, and underlying PIE aorist stems have long been proposed to account for various forms in the older Germanic languages, the survival of PIE aorist optatives in Germanic has never been explicitly considered. Taking as a starting point Old English cuman ‘come’ and its cognates, I argue that, if cuman goes back to the aorist subjunctive *gwém-e/o- of the PIE root *gwem- as widely believed (cf. Vedic gámati, Avestan jamaitī), the subjunctive cyme with its synchronically isolated umlaut could fact directly continue the aorist optative of the same root, attested e.g. in Avestan jamiiāt̨. The unexpected root vowel of cuman and Old Norse koma could thus be the result of either language-specific rules of rounding or generalization from the subjunctive. The remainder of the paper discusses other instances of umlauted subjunctives surviving in Old English, especially scyle to sculan ‘have to, be obliged to’, and the fate of other potential reflexes of PIE root aorist optatives in Germanic.
Aspectual distinctions in English and Polish: A strive for reconciliation
Iwona Kokorniak
One can easily observe cross-linguistic aspectual variation. In Slavic languages, e.g. Polish or Russian, one makes a distinction between grammatical types of aspect such as perfective and imperfective. In Romance languages, such as French, a contrast is made between perfective and imperfective aspect, whereas in Germanic languages, such as English, one can identify either progressive or non-progressive aspect. Another aspectual distinction is made with regard to aspectual classes, also known as Aktionsarten or situation aspects, bearing “on inherent features of the verb” (de Swart 2012: 753). As de Swart (2012: 754) notes, grammatical and situation aspect are different types of aspectual classification; nevertheless, she observes that there are “clear interactions between them”. One should also consider languages in which grammatical aspect is not present, but its semantic value is manifested in one way or another. Thus, revealing “the internal temporal constituency of a situation” (Comrie 1976: 3), aspect can be treated as “a covert semantic category on the sentential (or propositional) level” (Croft 2012).
The aim of this presentation is to compare aspectual classification of two distinct languages, belonging to two distinct language families, namely English and Polish, and show that, with the use of categorisation proposed by Langacker (e.g. 1987, 1991, 2008, 2009), they can be analysed in an integrated manner. For this purpose, I propose the Integrated Model of Aspect which is based on Comrie’s (1976) classification of aspect, used as the point of departure, and is extended by Croft’s (2012) aspectual types, with Janda’s (2015) modifications. As shown in the model, the two types of aspectual distinctions nicely fit together, and are conceptually motivated. Also, Langacker’s (1987, 1991, 2008, 2009) and Kochańska’s (2002) explications of aspectual features are included in the model to account for finer-grained distinctions. As a result, a top-bottom aspectual analysis is presented revealing close interaction of grammatical and situation aspect.
The model is analysed on the example of mental predicates whose aspectual potential has been considered “controversial” by Croft (2012: 98-99, 154). Here, the English mental predicate think and its Polish equivalent myśleć constitute the focus of attention. Their analysis allows to observe the verb’s aspectual potential dependent on context. In sum, the study shows that both English and Polish have developed grammatical means to reflect a gradual change in the internal temporal constituency of a situation.
References:
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Croft, William. 2012. Verbs: Aspect and causal structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Swart, Henriette. 2012. Verbal aspect, in: Robert Binnick (ed.), The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 752-780.
Janda, Laura A. 2015. Russian aspectual types: Croft’s typology revised, in: Miriam Shrager, George Fowler, Steven Franks and Edna Andrews (eds.), Studies in Slavic linguistics and accentology in honor of Ronald F. Feldstein. Bloomingtom: Slavica Publishers, pp. 147-167.
Kochańska, Agata. 2002. Selected issues in the semantics of the Polish imperfective: A cognitive grammar account [unpublished Ph. D. dissertation]. Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski.
Langacker, Ronald. W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Langacker, Ronald. W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 2: Descriptive application.. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2009. Constructions and constructional meaning, in: Vyvyan Evans and Stéphanie Pourcel (eds.), New directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 225-267.