| Abstrakt: |
The Eastern Neo-Aramaic language Turoyo has a complex relational verbal split of a type not found in other Neo-Aramaic languages. Besides the well-known split between present and preterite inflection frequently found across language families in the Middle East, the preterite has separate inflectional bases for transitive and intransitive verbs respectively. The morphosyntactic behaviour of the preterite has hitherto been described as an ergative inflection. This essay has two aims: to present, on the one hand, a detailed synchronic analysis of the coding of grammatical relations in the Turoyo verb, and to develop, on the other hand, a diachronic model which can explain these verb forms from their Middle Aramaic predecessors. It will be shown that the coding of grammatical relations in the Turoyo verb cannot be adequately described synchronically as an ergative inflection and that one cannot use the agreement suffixes alone as a sign of its relational type. Instead, it will become evident that the relational behaviour of Turoyo is rather complex, showing accusative behaviour in the present tense and a tripartite pattern with different coding for all three relational primitives (S, A, O) in the preterite tense. The latter is combined with split behaviour of the O primitive (i.e. differential objective marking, DOM). Furthermore, a closer examination of the distribution of the agreement suffixes, especially in regard to their (non-)obligatory nature, clearly demonstrates that the preterite inflection has many accusative traits which parallel the accusative behaviour of the present tense. From a diachronic point of view, this system can be derived from an earlier Aramaic participle-based inflection. However, it will be shown that the (non-)obligatory status of the participial (later verbal) suffixes has shifted closer to an accusative type in the development from the Aramaic template to the Turoyo verb. The history of the Turoyo verb system therefore shows a kind of morphosyntactic change that cannot be observed on the formal, but only on the distributional level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
