Re: Question about Morpheme Orders in Verbs.

From:    Elliott Lash <erelion12@...>
> My question therefore, is how does this develope? My
> instinctual feeling is that personal inflections are
> less associated with the verb than other information.
That's basically right.  Pronominal information is usually
situated at the edge of clauses, and thus when grammaticalization
occurs, they are usually the last things to glom onto verbs.
But if other particles for whatever reason find themselves
outside the scope of those pronouns, or get pushed there
after pronouns have already grammaticalized as agreement,
then other morphological orders can occur.

---------------------------------------------------------
From:    Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
> Swahili:
>
> Subj-TA-Obj-stem-(passive, applicative etc)-mood
>
> So the obj agreement comes between the tense/aspect marker and
> the verb stem.
There's a catch to some Bantu languages, though.  Bresnan and
Mchombo have shown that in at least some Bantu languages, the
object marker is actually an incorporated pronoun, and is not
true agreement.  That's why you can't have a subject NP and
the verb with no object agreement and no object NP; one or the
other or both have to be there.

(I'm not an expert on Bantu languages, so this may not hold in
Swahili.)

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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