Séminare SynSem avec Steven Foley (University of Georgia)

Steven Foley (University of Georgia) - Morphological variation and reanalysis in Georgian placeholder verbs

The Georgian placeholder verb construction, which has emerged relatively recently in the colloquial language, offers a unique window into morphosyntactic innovation and variation. Derived from reanalysis of the event-anaphoric verb phrase “do that”, placeholder verbs exhibit remarkable morphological variability: inflectional prefixes that have a fixed position in standard verbs can appear in multiple places in placeholders. This talk advances a few theoretical analyses of these patterns, each accounting for different combinations of the attested variants, and evaluates them in light of a morphological acceptability experiment. Judgement patterns across participants suggest that multiple grammars of the construction coexist: an unsurprising state of affairs, given that the reanalyzed demonstrative pronoun “that” has no unambiguous structural analogue in the standard Georgian verb. Some speakers seem to have internalized it as an incorporated theme; others, as a functional head; still others, as a sort of anaphor for subword constituents. This is a unique case study of grammaticization in progress — the emergence of a structurally innovative verb type within a language whose verbal morphology is already quite complex.