Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Auxiliaries, grammaticalization, and word order in Mande

2003; De Gruyter Mouton; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1515/jall.2003.003

1613-3811

Raimund Kastenholz,

Historical Linguistics and Language Studies

Languages of the Mande family are known for their split predicate syntax, involving auxiliary elements that are often called predicate markers in literature. Word order in Mande (disregarding the auxiliaries at this point) is S-O-V, with adverbs and oblique case objects following the verb. This structure has given rise to a number of questions concerning historical syntax, and the grammaticalization of the auxiliary elements. In the light of evidence from Central Mande, the possibility of a verbal origin (vs. non-verbal sources) of these elements is discussed in the present article. I shall argue that auxiliaries for TAM categories central to the systems (imperfective, perfective) cannot convincingly be shown to be derived from verbs. Conversely, there is reasonable evidence for a non-verbal origin of the perfective markers in the Manding dialect continuum, and beyond. In the view adopted here, the emergence of auxiliaries cannot be argued to have caused word order change in the early history of Mande.