Project 10

Argument structure constructions with prepositions and phrasal verbs in Arabic and other Semitic languages

(Third Party Funds Group – Sub project)

Abstract:

One of the key challenges of this project is to explore to what extent and in what form the Construction Grammar approach can be applied to a Semitic language. Indeed, it would seem that the concept of constructional space is apt to capture and formally analyze the form-meaning pairings entailed in the system of diatheses/binyanim expressing voice, intensity, reflexivity, interaction, and other qualities (cf., e.g., Retsö 1989) characteristic of Arabic and other Semitic languages, but, to the best of our knowledge, Construction Grammar has not been used in the analysis of Arabic so far. The main focus of the present project will lie on verbal constructions with prepositions and particles, and in particular on the interaction of prepositional constructions with verbs in the creation of meaningful units (which in turn may be stored holistically by speakers as low-level constructions) and on phrasal verbs in Arabic and Semitic in general.
Even a superficial look at an Arabic-European lexicon reveals various and seemingly contradicting meanings for the verb daʕā ‘to call’, namely ‘to pray’ and ‘to curse’. A closer look shows that these meaning depend on the prepositions governed by the core verb, li ‘for’ and ʕalā ‘upon, against’, respectively. Diachronically, daʕʿā li means ‘to invoke God on someone’s behalf’, and daʕā ʕalā ‘to invoke God against someone’, resulting in the contradictory semantics.
Synchronically, however, speakers (usually) are not aware of this background. Rather, they use the combination of core verb and preposition as an exocentric construction. This type of exocentric constructions permeates the whole verbal system of Semitic and still awaits a systematic investigation. Certain prepositions in this context have undergone grammaticalization (cf., e.g., Rubin 2005). By and large, the same holds true for the meaning of derived diatheses (binyanim) in Semitic and the relationship between intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive uses of one and the same verb in different constructions. While the meaning of derived diatheses is predictable in some cases, this is not the case in other cases, which, again, can be better captured in terms of exocentric constructions used morpho-syntactic building blocks. Experiencer constructions also play an important role in this context (cf., e.g., Retsö 1987 and Edzard 2016). A related type of construction in Semitic is presented by phrasal verbs. There is a host of constructions in Arabic and Semitic, among them cognate object constructions which reflect the concept of “conflated complements” (e.g. Talmy 1985). What is more, there also exist constructions, notably in Ethio-Semitic, that typically consist of an invariable element (e.g. an ideophone, onomatopoetic element or noun, sometimes with an opaque meaning) and a grammaticalized (semantically bleached) verb with the original meaning ‘to say’ or ‘to do’. In Amharic, the relevant verbs are ʔalä ‘to say’ and ʔadärrägä ‘to do’. Examples include k’uʧʧ’ ʔalä ‘to sit’, zɨmm ʔalä ‘to be quiet’, k’uʧʧ’ ʔadärrägä ‘to put down’, and täsfa ʔadärrägä ‘to hope’. The semantics of zɨmm ʔalä ‘to be quiet’ (lit. “to say zɨmm“) perfectly illustrates the relevance of the concept of construction.
The project is to explore the hypothesis that a model that combines the level of rather abstract argument structure constructions (Goldberg 1995, 2006) with the valency properties of particular lexical units by regarding lexical items as an integral part of these constructions (Herbst 2018, 2020; Goldberg & Herbst 2021) would provide an adequate framework for describing valency phenomena in Semitic languages.
The combination of verbs and prepositions on the one hand, and the internal composition of phrasal verbs in Semitic on the other hand, often represent an exocentric scenario, i.e. the meaning of the whole verb phrase cannot be automatically deduced from the meaning of the constituents; in other words, such cases are constructions (in the sense of Langacker 1987, Goldberg 2019, and Hilpert 2020) par excellence. For Arabic and Semitic, this question has never been systematically analyzed. The clear delineation of the relevant exocentric constructions thus addresses GRQs CON1 (How do we identify constructions?) and CON2 (To what extent is constructional knowledge determined by the specific items occurring in them (collo-profiles) and how can we measure and operationalize the degree of lexical specificity vs. productivity of construction slots?). What is more the GRQs USE1 (What factors influence speakers’ choices from a range of competing constructions?) and USE2 (To what extent do the factors determining the choice of construction differ between speakers with respect to their individual backgrounds and personalities?) are of high relevance especially in the realms of dialectal variation, accommodation to other peoples and cultures, and multilingualism. Furthermore, the constructions analyzed can be included in the RTG’s research construction as examples of how the format for constructicon entries originally developed for English can be used for Semitic languages. The subproject can be linked in a meaningful way with those subprojects that methodologically address questions of valency and the internal composition of verbal phrases, notably the subprojects of Stefan Evert and Thomas Herbst (“Delineating Constructions”) and of Mechthild Habermann and Ludwig Fesenmeier (“German verbs with particle or prefix in language change”).