Re: THEORY: Verbs go irregular before our very eyes!

At 11:03 PM -0500 10/29/01, John Cowan wrote:
>The final explanation, I think, is that the rule-based mechanism
>no longer works in present-day Maori.  Instead, there are now separate passive
>suffixes "-tia", "-kia", "-ngia", "-hia", etc., of which "-tia" is the regular
>ending, and the others are lexically specific, just like English strong verbs.
>Of course, only a few verbs, the new ones, have become regularized as
>yet.  We can probably expect Maori, if it survives, to have some of the
>rarer verbs losing their irregular inflections in favor of -tia.
This is precisely the solution that Ken Hale proposed in 1973 in his
paper "Deep-surface Canonical Disparities in Relation to Analysis and
Change: An Australian Example." While the focus of the paper is a set
of alternations from Lardil, he includes as an illustration the Maori
passive analysis.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                              Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead;
therefore we must learn both arts."            - Thomas Carlyle

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