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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter (A) September 25, 2009

Valence promiscuity and its consequences

  • Werner Abraham

Summary

The ensuing paper is about the promiscuity of active and passive forms and their functions in Early Romance. Specifically, ever since the synthetic simple passive was gradually abandoned since Late Latin, new composite forms emerged involving several full verbs, among which fakere. The unusual novel use of facere+P(ast)P(articiple) in passive function in Old Sardinian (Logudorese) first signalled by MEYER-LÜBKE (1902) was hypothesized to reflect the early equivalence facere/fieri ‘make, do/be done’ in Late Latin, whereby feci ‘made, did’ equalled factus sum ‘made/done was’. It is argued that indeed the grammaticalization of facere as a passive auxiliary might be related to the equivalence between the transitive verb facere and its pro-passive fieri. Other than argued by CENNAMO and MEYER-LÜBKE it is held that this type of promiscuity can only be understood if one places it within the wider phenomenon of promiscuous verbal argument linking (a reflex of which is the equivalence facere/fieri). What is more, it is argued that this blurred pre-merge lexical syntax is the precedent stage for the rise of SVO and the novel equivalence of S=Top – an emergence against the prior Topic prominent stage of (Late) Latin.

Published Online: 2009-09-25
Published in Print: 2005-04-01

© Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, München

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