Duthie, Nicholas Evans, Mary Keleve, John McDowell, Bill McGregor, Tim. Shopen, Anna Wierzbicka and Kwesi Yankah for their comments and encouragement.
© Australian Journal ofLinguistics 8 (1988), 185-217. Printed in Australia.
THE GRAMMATICAL CODING OF THE TERMINAL VIEWPOINT OF SITUATIONS IN EWE: A SEMANTIC PERSPECTIVE Felix K. Ameka
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:19 14 December 2010
[...] any word which a language permits to survive must make its semantic contribution; [...] the same holds for any construction that is physically distinct from any other construction. Bolinger (1977:ix)
1.0. INTRODUCTION*
This paper investigates the expression of the terminal viewpoint of situations in Ewe, a Kwa - or more appropriately, a Tano-Congo language of West Africa, by the use of aspectual verbal modifiers.1 In *
1
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to audiences at Linguistics Departmental seminar meetings at the Australian National University, Canberra, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Ghana, Legon; and at the 17th Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics, University of Leiden (Sept. 1987). I am grateful for all the comments received at these presentations. I am especially indebted to Lawrence Boadi, Susanna Cumming, Mary Esther Dakubu, Mark Durie, Alan Duthie, Nicholas Evans, Mary Keleve, John McDowell, Bill McGregor, Tim Shopen, Anna Wierzbicka and Kwesi Yankah for their comments and encouragement. The final version of this article benefited from the insightful remarks of two AJL reviewers. I am, however, the only one responsible for the shortcomings of the paper. Ewe is spoken in the south eastern corner of Ghana across southern Togo as far as and just across the Togo-Benin border into Benin in West Africa. The normal orthography, based on the African alphabet, is used throughout the paper with the following modifications: (i) all high tones are marked with an acute accent ', in addition to the low tones which are customarily marked with ', (ii) the IPA Φ is used for the orthographic f. iii) υ is the orthographic form for the phonetic β. AU other symbols have their IPA phonetic value, (iv) hyphens are introduced to show morpheme boundaries where relevant. The following abbreviations are used in the paper: COMP DEM HAB
complementizer demonstrative habitual
COMPL completive FOC focus INGR ingressive
DEF FUT LOC
definite article future locative
FELIX K. AMEKA
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:19 14 December 2010
some of the previous studies of Ewe, three grammatical morphemes, vo. se\ and kp5,have been identified as "completive" or "perfective" markers (see in particular Duthie (1970, 1988, in press) and also Westermann (1930:131-133) and Pazzi (1970:117)). Apart from descriptive comments on the structural properties of these forms and of their historical development from lexical verbs, no systematic study has yet been done on the nuances of meanings that the morphemes encode within the "perfective" semantic domain. In addition, the various interpretations that the individual morphemes have in different contexts have not been explored. Intuitively, native speakers can feel and appreciate the semantic differences among the following sentences: (la) kofi K. 'Kofi (Kofi
de suku kpd go school PFV has been to school before.' has had some formal education before.)
(lb) kofi me" de suku kpo(kp5kp5) K. NEG go school PFV 'Kofi has never been to school.'
o. NEG
(2a) kof! de suku vo. 'Kofi has completed school' (2b) kofi de suku vovovo. 'Kofi has almost completed school'. (3) kofi de suku s6 'Kofi has stopped/quit school.' Roughly speaking, (la) describes a situation that has obtained at least once in the past, (lb), on the other hand, indicates that the situation has not obtained. In (2a) the situation is presented as one which has been completed; there is no more of that activity to be performed by Kofi, so to speak. Example (2b) implies that the situation is on the point of being terminated. By contrast, (3) characterizes the situation as one that has LOG logophoric pronoun PFV perfective PRES present REL relativizer SG singular VS verb satelite 1 first person
NEG PL PROG REP TP
negative plural progressive repetitive terminal particle
OBJ POSS Q segp TRIPL
object possessive linker question segmentai particle triplication
2
second person
3
third person
186
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:19 14 December 2010
GRAMMATICAL CODING IN EWE been terminated but not necessarily completed. The English glosses provided are suggestive of these interpretations. Ewe grammarians have been content to describe the morphemes as markers of perfectivity without due regard to the semantic nuances manifested by their distinct usages. In doing so they fail to recognize, in my view, the relevance of the semantic distinctions that the language has maintained (see the quote from Bolinger above). The analytic task of the present study is to explore the subtle semantic differences encoded by the three forms within the "semantic space" of the "end-point" of situations (cf. Sapir and Swadesh 1932). It will be argued that vo signifies that something has happened or has been done completely. When it is used without triplication in certain contexts and with triplication in others, it indicates that a situation is about to be completed. By contrast, s6 indicates that a situation has been terminated and it is incomplete, while kp5 symbolizes the existential status of situations. To emphasize the nonmanifest status of situations kp5 may be triplicated. The statement of the meanings of these forms does not stop at the kind of abstract description just outlined in the previous paragraph; rather explicit semantic representations are proposed for the constructions in which the morphemes occur. Essentially these semantic representations are natural language explications which are arrived at through the process of reductive paraphrasing of the construction being analyzed (cf. Wierzbicka 1972, 1980, 1988). These paraphrases are couched in a metalanguage of relatively simple, comprehensible and intuitively verifiable terms derived from a natural language, English. Such paraphrases are crucial, for several reasons, in any attempt to attain the sorts of goals set out in this paper - first, it is only through explications that one can display the kind of semantic content that so-called contentless grammatical items, such as the ones described in this paper, have; second, such definitions expose the inadequacy of abstract labels which are frequently used to describe grammatical items, such as the "perfective/completive" label for the morphemes under discussion; third, the similarities and differences between related items which are usually assigned the same syntactic or communicative function are easily discernible from a comparison of their semantic formulae. Above all, the definitions have predictive power, that is, the various uses of an item can be predicted from its explication, provided it is adequately formulated. The main theoretical and methodological point of this paper is to demonstrate, through the use of Ewe material, the value of natural language definitions in elucidating the meanings of aspectual markers. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In section 2, some of the concepts employed in the presentation are clarified. This is followed in section 3 by a syntactic identification of the three morphemes. The semantic analysis of the forms is presented in section 4. Some remarks 187
FELIX K.AMEKA on the findings of the study are made in the concluding section of the paper. We also present cross-linguistic evidence, in the concluding section, to show that imminent completion is one of the meanings that perfective markers may have.
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:19 14 December 2010
2.0. PRELIMINARY DISCUSSION ON SITUATIONS AND ASPECT In this study, situations (i.e. events, processes, actions and states, cf. Comrie (1976) and Mourelatos (1981)) are considered to be temporally segmentable. And aspect is construed as the different ways of viewing the internal temporal structure and the reference to distinct intervals in the temporal development of situations (cf. Comrie ibid: 3; Freed 1979:10ff; Johnson 1981:152; Dahl 1985:24ff). Following Freed (1979:30ff) it is assumed that situations in general have an onset - a first moment, a nucleus - a main part, and a coda - a final temporal phase. The nucleus can be further decomposed into an initial period, a middle, and a final part, These temporal segments of a situation can be diagrammed as follows: INITIAL I MIDDLE I FINAL
ONSET
NUCLEUS
CODA
FIG. 1 THE TEMPORAL PHASES OF A SITUATION
The onset of a situation is the 'temporal segment of a situation which takes place prior to the initial temporal part of the nucleus' of that situation (Freed ibid:31, emphasis in original). It is a necessary and an obligatory preparatory stage in the ontogeny of every situation. The initial part of the nucleus is the first moment or period during which the nuclear or characteristic activity of the situation can be said to be taking place. It should be noted that language does not code reality directly; it is a codification of how people perceive reality and it is the representation or "construction" of this reality in language that linguistic semantics are about (cf.Grace 1987 among others). And although it may be hard, in reality, (and perhaps impossible) to draw a line between the successive temporal phases of a situation, languages tend to provide linguistic forms for the description of such stages in the evolution of a situation. Thus English, for instance, has the aspectual verbs start and begin which are used to refer to the onset and the initial period of the nucleus of situations respectively (cf. Freed 1979 and Wierzbicka 1988). It is 188
GRAMMATICAL CODING IN EWE
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:19 14 December 2010
instructive, in this connection, to observe that of the two sentences below: (a) ?John started to cook, but he didn't cook. (b) *John began to cook, but he didn't cook. (a) sounds better than (b). The reason for this, I believe, is that the conceptualization of the real world event presented in (a) is less contradictory than the one represented in (b). Roughly speaking, the message conveyed by (a) is that John went through the preparatory stages of cooking, such as getting pots and ingredients ready, but he never performed the nuclear activity of cooking. That is, the onset, but not the nucleus, of the situation has been attained. Hence it makes sense to say that the main part of the event didn't happen. The message of (b), by contrast, is anomalous: the first part of the nucleus of the situation is portrayed as having been accomplished and at the same time the occurrence of the situation is denied. This is what makes (b) more bizarre than (a). The middle part of the nucleus is the period after the first moment and the final part is the last moment or period during which the nuclear activity can be thought of as taking place. After this last temporal phase the nuclear activity could be thought of as being over and some situations could not go on beyond this point. Many situations also have a time segment just after the nucleus which must be realized for the events which they represent to be thought of as having been completed (cf. Freed ibid:35). This is the c o d a . One could think of the difference between the final part of the nucleus and the coda in terms of the contrast between the English verbs finish and end, for example. As Wierzbicka (1988:77) points out: 'the main difference [between finish and end - F.A.] is that end refers to the point immediately after the last part [i.e. the coda F.A.] whereas finish refers to the last part [of the nucleus F.A.] itself.' Notice also that 'in a race the finish comes before the end (the runners or horses move into the finish with X in the lead')'(Wierzbicka ibid.:78). The "perfective" and "imperfective" aspectual categories have been distinguished in terms of whether the situation is viewed as having an internal temporal structure or not: Perfectivity indicates the view of a situation as a single whole without distinction of the various separate phases that make up that situation while the imperfective pays essential attention to the internal structure of the situation. Comrie (1976:16) This characterization seems applicable to the semantic category of the perfective but not necessarily to all the uses of the markers of that 189
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:19 14 December 2010
FELIX K.AMEKA
category. It seems to be the case that linguistic realizations of the perfective category tend to be used to signal distinct phases or intervals in the development of situations. Such expressions tend to be interpreted as marking the inception (the onset) especially of states, or the cessation (the final part of the nucleus or the coda) of situations. Perfective markers, morphological or lexical, thus tend to have an ingressive and/or an egressive meaning in context (Comrie 1976:19; Chung and Timberlake 1985:217). From a localist viewpoint, perfective aspect is construed as denoting going into, being in and coming out of a situation, and ingressive aspect focuses on going into while egressive aspect focuses on coming out of a situation. Consequently, ingressive and egressive aspect are often analyzed as subcategories of perfective aspect (cf. Brinton 1985:31). It will be shown that perfective markers may also be used to indicate the beginning of, or the period just before the final part of the nucleus, or of the coda of situations (see § 4.1.). It seems therefore that the internal temporal structure of situations is relevant and useful for the analysis of the linguistic indicators of perfectivity Such a position is not, to my mind, incompatible with conceptualizing the perfective as a view of a situation as a whole. What it implies is that a perfective marker may signal a particular stage in the evolution of whole situations. Thus a perfective marker may focus on the inception, or the period just before the inception, or the total or imminent completion of a whole situation. The classification of situations proposed by Mourelatos (1981:201), based on the work of Kenny (1965) and Vendler (1967) as shown in Fig. 2, is assumed in this study: SITUATIONS STATES
OCCURRENCES ACTIONS
I
I
I
PROCESSES INACTIVITIES]
EVENTS [K. PERFORMANCES]
r
i
DEVELOPMENTS PUNCTUAL OCCURRENCE [V. ACCOMPLISHMENTS] [V. ACHIEVEMENTS] FIG. 2: MOURELATOS' CLASSIFICATION OF SITUATIONS
[In Fig 2, V. or K. before a label refers to the terms used by Vendler and Kenny respectively.] 190
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:19 14 December 2010
GRAMMATICAL CODING IN EWE
States are unchanging conditions over an extended period. These are represented by English examples such as be sick and love . Processes are homogeneous situations that could occur over an indefinite time stretch. Events are actions that involve a product or outcome. Developments culminate in an end-point and punctual occurrences occur at a single point in time. The traditionally recognized intrinsic properties of situations such as durativity, dynamicity and telicity (or "closure", Chung and Timberlake 1985:216) can be related to the various phases of situations described above (see also Dowty 1979, Declerck 1979 and Dahl 1981 on the telic/atelic distinction). Briefly, punctual occurrences as represented by English verbs such as hit and flash, can be construed as having an onset and a temporally non-segmentable nucleus. Durative situations, in contrast, have nuclei that are segmentable into various temporal phases of their evolution. Similarly, dynamic situations have the potential to develop through all the phases unless they are interrupted at some stage. Linguistic forms that characterize telic situations, i.e. situations that have a terminal point beyond which it will not be true to say that that situation holds, may have their focus either on the final part of the nucleus or on the coda. If they are durative or dynamic, for example, English drown (accomplishments in Vendler's terms or developments in Mourelatos' terms) they could be viewed as having temporally segmentable phases up to the final part of the nucleus. Punctual occurrences that are also inherently telic can be viewed as having their end points co-terminous with the nucleus. For instance, reach and discover can be thought of in this way (see Lys and Mommer 1986 for a classification of verbs along similar lines). It should be stressed that although linguistic expressions, such as verbs, may have inherent aspectual properties, reported situations may be endowed with these properties according to a speaker's communicated conceptualization of them. The speaker's view of a realworld happening determines the choice of linguistic expressions, especially of the aspectual meaning-bearing forms to describe it. For example, a real-world event denoted by the predicate hit would normally be a punctual occurrence, and hit is arguably inherently punctual in meaning, but a speaker may conceptualize an act of hitting as a durative activity, this conceptualization may be linguistically codified in one of the following ways in English: 1. 2.
by the progressive: 'John is hitting Mary'; or by the use of aspectual verbs such as keep and continue: 'John keeps hitting Mary', 'John continued hitting/to hit Mary' 191
FELIX K.AMEKA (See King 1983 and Smith 1983 and 1986 among others for the view that the speaker's perspective of a situation is determinative of the way in which aspectual meanings are encoded.) This paper attempts to discover and state the way in which the Ewes conceptualize the termination or completion of a situation when they choose one of the morphemes vof s6 and kp5 to characterize it.
Downloaded By: [Macquarie University] At: 09:19 14 December 2010
3.0. THE SYNTAX OF THE "PERFECTIVE" MARKERS
It has been indicated that the three morphemes under discussion have homophonous verbal counterparts. In this section an attempt is made to describe the syntactic properties that distinguish the grammatical items from the lexical verbs. The main channel for the grammaticization of verbs in Ewe is the serial verbal construction (cf. Heine and Reh 1984:242). There are two structural types of serial verbal constructions in Ewe. In the first type, the subject of the first predicate is identical with the subject of the other predicates in the series. Because of this, the subject of the other predicates has a zero realization. The verbs in this type have identical tense, aspect and mood marking. In example (4) both verbs are marked for the habitual aspect. Notice that in this particular case, both predicates in the series have identical subjects and objects: (4) c^evi - a" w
