'COME' and 'GO' off the Beaten Grammaticalization Path

Maud Devos, Jenneke van der Wal

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9783110335910
• eBook ISBN: 9783110371994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Sémantique linguistique

This edition brings together some lesser known grammaticalization paths travelled by 'come' and 'go' in familiar and less familiar languages. No single book volume has been dedicated to the topic of grammatical targets different from tense and aspect so far. This study will increase our insight in grammaticalization processes in general as they force us to rethink certain aspects of grammaticalization.

Discourse functions

dp n="196" folio="186" ? dp n="197" folio="187" ?

Ana Bravo

The Spanish auxiliary ir ‘to go’: from resultative motion verb to focus marker⁸³

1 Spanish standard constructions with the auxiliary verb ir ‘to go’ + infinitive and standard grammaticalization paths

Spanish presents two clearly different constructions with the auxiliary verb ir ‘to go’ plus an infinitive.⁸⁴ In one of them ir expresses either prospective aspect or future tense – depending on the author – in the same way that its English and its French counterparts do, as is shown in (1):⁸⁵

• (1)
  1. {Va / Iba} a llover.
  2. It {is / was} going to rain.
  3. Il {va / allait} pleuvoir.

The second construction, recognized as productive and different from the prospective periphrasis only in a few works (Gómez Torrego (1999), Fernández de Castro (1999) and RAE-ASALE (2009)), is exemplified in (2):

⁸⁶

‘The ball bounced and it ended up hitting the window.’

‘The ball bounced and it happened to hit the window.’

In this case, the construction with ir is aspectually perfective. In addition, it is said to typically highlight the situation referred to with the infinitive by presenting it as the last one in a sequence of previous eventualities (here the bouncing of the ball). For this reason it is considered to be a synonym to acabar ‘to end’ + gerund, Eng. end (up) + -ing, that is, a sort of a discourse marker along the proposal of Dietrich (1973) for Sp. acabar + gerund, and not a perfective marker, so (2) is equivalent to (3):

• (3) La pelota rebotó y acabó dando contra la ventana.
  ‘The ball bounced and it ended up hitting the window.’

In Section 3.1 I will depart from this analysis and I will defend that ir in (2) is a resultative semi lexical verb (IR_res).

Apart from the prospective and the resultative constructions in (1) and (2), the Spanish auxiliary ir ‘to go’ may function as a focus marker in a construction that has passed almost unnoticed as such until now.⁸⁷ An example is given in (4), where the brackets and the subscript f indicate a focused constituent:

‘Of all the days of the year, it had to rain my wedding day.’

For the construction with the form ir ‘to go’ + y ‘and’ + a tensed verb, as in Juan va y se cae ‘John goes and falls’, Arnaiz and Camacho (1999) have argued that the auxiliary ir functions as a topic auxiliary; however, if there is a topic, a focus is also to be expected, so a relationship may be asserted to exist between the auxiliary verb in (4) and this topic auxiliary.⁸⁸ Nevertheless, the study of both the grammatical properties of this construction and the possible connections among resultative, sequential and focus markers lays outside of the scope of the present investigation.

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it attempts to describe the focus construction (IR_focus) in (4) as both semantically and syntactically independent from the resultative construction in (2) in synchronic terms. If I am right, then Spanish ir offers additional support for recent studies showing that ‘go’ verbs can also grammaticalize into focus markers (Devos and van der Wal (2010) for the Bantu language Shangaci, and Carlson – in this volume – for Supyire).

Secondly, it aims at describing the possible grammaticalization trend followed by the focus construction. As will be shown, the focus construction (IR_focus) develops out of the resultative one (IR_res).⁸⁹ Specifically, the process will be analyzed as an instance of a semantic change that – following Eckardt (2006)– takes place under syntactic reanalysis. It will, in addition, turn out from my research that, although some semantic features of the lexical motion verb ir (IR_lex) form the basis for the development of IR_res, these are absent in IR_focus, a proposal that challenges the semantic retention hypothesis (Bybee, Perkins and Plagiuca 1994), if it is correct. The consequences that follow for a theory of grammaticalization will be examined along with the conclusions in the last part of this contribution.

This chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2 I present the basic postulates on grammaticalization that I assume; in Section 3 the syntactic and semantic properties of the two constructions will be given; Section 4 is devoted to explaining how the focus construction develops out of the resultative construction. In Section 5 I present a summary with the major findings.

2 Some assumptions about grammaticalization

There are by now some widely accepted hypotheses concerning the phenomenon of grammaticalization and, for this reason, in this paper I will assume them without further discussion.⁹⁰ Hence, I stick here to the very general definition of grammaticalization as a linguistic mechanism by virtue of which some linguistic element develops into something more grammatical.⁹¹ In the following, I will concentrate ...

Table of contents

• Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Passives
• Mood and modality
• Discourse functions
• Conclusion
• Subject index
• Language index