Inchoative
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Inchoative aspect (also called inceptive aspect) is a verbal category, referring to an action soon to take place. It can be found in conservative Indo-European languages such as Latin and Lithuanian, and also in Balto-Finnic languages. In other languages, auxiliary verbs can be used, for example French (as aller plus infinitive: je vais faire "I am going to do", Futur proche), English (often as "I am going to do" or "I am about to do"), Italian (as stare plus per and infinitive: io sto per fare "I am about to do"). In these cases, the term near future is more commonly used.
Since inchoative is an aspect and not a tense, it can be combined with tenses to form present inchoative, past inchoative and future inchoative, all used in Lithuanian. Finnish employs a systematic construction ole-TEMP-PERS X-maisilla-POSS "to be on (my/your/etc.) X-ings", where the temporal and personal ending and possessive suffix are to be selected according to the context. For example, "ol+i+t kaatu+maisilla+si", literally "you were on your fallings down", meaning "you were about to fall down". The -maisilla- is a string of derivational suffixes: ma participle; i plural; s adjective suffix; lla adessive case. In Russian, inchoatives are regularly derived from unidirectional imperfective verbs of motion by adding the prefix по-, e.g. бежать - побежать: "to run" - "to start running". Also cf. шли (normal past tense plural of идти - "to go") vs. "Пошли!" meaning approximately "We'll be off! / We're gone!".
The term inchoative verb is used by generative grammarians to refer to a class of verbs that reflect a change of state. e.g., John aged or The fog cleared. This usage bears little or no relationship to the aspectual usage described above.
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[edit] Inchoativity in contact linguistics
[edit] The impact of Yiddish on "Israeli"
According to linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann, in shaping the semantics of the verbal system of Modern Hebrew (which he terms "Israeli"), Yiddish has systematized Israeli inchoativity, which denotes the beginning of an action (an inceptive). While Israeli shakháv "was lying down (3rd person, masculine, singular)" is neutral, Israeli nishkáv "lay down, started being lain down (3rd person, masculine, singular)" is inchoative. Many Israeli inchoative forms are new and did not exist in Hebrew. The verb-templates chosen to host these forms are the ones possessing prefixes: niXXáX and hitXaXéX.
Zuckermann suggests that it is not that the niXXáX and hitXaXéX verb-templates were chosen to host the inchoative forms because the Yiddish inchoative forms usually have a prefix (consider Yiddish avékleygn zikh "lie down" and avékshteln zikh "stand up", as opposed to the neutral Yiddish lígn "be lying down"). Rather, since the non-inchoative forms are semantically unmarked, the verb-template hosting them is the unmarked XaXáX. Consequently, other verb-templates — which happen to include "prefixes" — host the inchoative forms, thus making the inchoative aspect in Israeli systematic.
According to Zuckermann, "whilst Yiddish also indicates inchoativity by the use of the reflexive zikh or of vern 'become', Israeli opted to grammaticalize this notion using its existing system of verb-templates, in this case two intransitive verb-templates: passive niXXáX and reflexive, reciprocal hitXaXéX. In other words, Yiddish introduced a clear-cut semantic-grammatical distinction in Israeli between inchoative and non-inchoative, using the pre-existent inventory of Hebrew forms."[1]
Furthermore, "the Yiddish impact may also be seen in the presence of analytic neutral (noninchoative) verbs which have developed — due to analogy — from inchoative forms, for example hayá malé ‘was full (masculine)’, hayá zakén ‘was old (masculine)’, and hayá nirgásh ‘was excited (masculine)’. Note also that often the Yiddish contribution has resulted in the increased use of a pre-existent inchoative Hebrew form."[2]
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ See pp. 54-56 in Zuckermann, Ghil'ad, Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns. In Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2 (2009), pp. 40-67.
- ^ See pp. 54-56 in Zuckermann, Ghil'ad, Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns. In Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2 (2009), pp. 40-67.
