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Studies in Language
Vol. 42:2 (2018) ► pp.418–454

The affective construction in Yoron Ryukyuan

| Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
| Okinawa International University

In Yoron Ryukyuan, passives are formed through the verbal suffix ‘-ari’. In this article, we observe that the suffix is used to form a construction distinguished from the standard passives in several respects: (i) attachment of ‘-ari’ to a wide range of predicates, (ii) ‘-ari’ obligatorily coexisting with the clause-linking suffix ‘-ti’, (iii) the case-marking pattern identical to that of active sentences, among other properties. Semantically, this construction expresses that the speaker is affected (typically, in an adversative fashion) by the situation denoted by the ‘-ari’-attached predicate. We call this linguistic unit "Affective Construction" (AC), revealing its unique syntactic and semantic properties. Furthermore, we suggest that the development of ‘-ari’ into ‘-ari-ti’ to constitute the AC may be viewed as an instance of grammaticalisation, with remarks on its generality in line with Unidirectionality and on the licensing conditions on the AC which seem to be uncommon cross-linguistically.

Keywords: Yoron Ryukyuan, affectedness, passive, voice, case
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Descriptive preliminaries
    • 2.1Basic grammatical properties
    • 2.2Passive constructions
  • 3.The affective construction
    • 3.1Case marking
    • 3.2Grammatical relation and semantic role
    • 3.3Attachability of ‑ari
    • 3.4Co-occurrence with ‑ti
    • 3.5Proposal
  • 4.Further considerations
    • 4.1Semantic issues
    • 4.2Syntactic issues
  • 5.Remarks on grammaticalisation
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 June 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.17002.ser
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