Speaker: Amanda Swenson (MIT)
Title: A Semantics for Malayalam Conjunctive Participles Constructions
Time: Thursday, March 10th, 12:30-1:45 pm
Place: 32-D461
Amritavalli & Jayaseelan (2005), Hany Babu & Madhavan (2003), a.o. raise the question of whether the traditional tense morphemes should be reanalyzed as aspect in Malayalam, making Malayalam a tenseless language. Conjunctive Participle/Serial Verb Constructions, (1), play a central role in this debate.
(1) a. njaan oru maanga pootticch-u thinn-u
I one mango pluck-U/I eat-PAST
I plucked and ate a mango. (Amritavalli & Jayaseelan 2005 p199: 37a)
b. mani avan-te katha karanj-u paranj-u.
Mani he-GEN tale cry-U/I tell-PAST
Weeping, Mani told his tale. (Gopalkrishnan 1985 p18: 8)In this talk I assume, following Hany Babu & Madhavan (2003) and Asher & Kumari (1997) a.o., that the u/i marker in Conjunctive Participles (`non-main verbs) has a distinct temporal analysis from that of main verbs. In main verbs, u/i is a past tense marker and in non-main verbs it is a semantically vacuous, frozen form (cf. Jayaseelan 2003). I propose an account for the way multi-verb constructions are temporally interpreted based on Stump (1985), thereby removing an argument for the claim that Malayalam is a tenseless language.