Non-spatial setting
19.12 Speed and ease
As noted in§19.3.1, a statement may be generic or ‘timeless’; for instance, Birds fly and fish swim. There is also ‘habitual’ indicating that something happens at regular intervals; this is sometimes restricted to what happened in the past. For Southern Paiute, Sapir (1930–1: 175) explains that what he called the ‘usitative’ suffix, -n.ï-n, is ‘used only before past passive participle’.
An example is ‘my always saying it’.
For Yuchi (isolate, Oklahoma), Wagner (1934: 355–6) recognizes four
‘aspects’. One is essentially spatial, the distributive, as in ‘They jumped over here and there’. There is also durative (see§19.9), plus:
rreiterative, shown by reduplication, as in wEk"a" yugwa-gwa ‘he was talk-ing now and again’
rhabitual, shown by suffix -nE, as in honOndzo"a-nE" ‘he used to ask us’
The ‘aspect’ suffixes given for Kwakiutl by Boas (1947: 241) include:
r-a, statement of single act or simple condition, as in ‘strike with the fist’
r=EnakwEla, gradual, continued motion, one after another, as in ‘to hang one after another’
r-k"a, repetitive, as in ‘to go again and again’
r-[x]dala, to be habitually, as in ‘to hurt oneself habitually’
r-(E)s, continuously, as in ‘to sleep continuously, all the time’
Tariana (Aikhenvald 2003: 366–7) has a set of ‘degree markers’ including
‘a bit’, ‘really’, ‘more or less, just about’, and ‘a lot’.
19.12 Speed and ease
A fair number of languages include in their grammar a morphological process relating to speed. There is suffix -nbal ∼ -galiy ‘do it quickly’ in Dyirbal (Dixon 1972: 248), suffix -rpaya ‘rapidly’ in Bolivian Quechua (Crapo and Aitken 1986: 3), and suffix -uri ‘rapid velocity’ in Urarina (isolate, Peru:
Olawsky2006: 471–3, 632). The latter is illustrated in:
(65) kwara-uri-a
see-rapid.velocity-neutral ku-a go-3sg.A
She went to see him quickly (e.g. to briefly say goodbye)
The two verbs in (65) make up a serial verb construction. However, the rapid velocity suffix has scope only over ‘see’—the seeing was quick, not the going.
Grammatical marking of ‘do it slowly’ is far less common. Mithun and Ali (1996) list more than twenty ‘aspectual categories’ for Central Alaskan Yup"ik (Eskimo). Many of them relate to parameters discussed above,
including ‘customarily’, ‘always’, ‘now and then’, ‘repeatedly’, ‘keep on, continue’, and ‘a little at a time’. The list includes -(g)ar(ar)te- ‘briefly, suddenly’, as in ‘He left suddenly’, and also -qataar- ‘begin slowly’, as in:
(66) nere-qataar-tu-q
eat-begin.slowly-intransitive:indicative-3sg
waniwa now He is going to slowly start eating
Another parameter of non-spatial setting relates to manner—the ease with which an action is performed. For Angami (Tibeto-Burman, Nagaland, India), Giridhar (1980: 75–6) identifies what he calls types of mood:
r‘The mood of Ease denotes that the agent considers the action identified by the verb easy to perform’. It is shown by suffix -s¯@ to the verb.
r‘The Exertive mood denotes that the action identified by the verb is achieved with considerable effort, and hence contrasts with the mood of ease. It is marked by -liê.’
From the verb root dùkrî ‘kill’ can be formed:
(67) dùk´r\ı-s¯@ ‘kill with ease (for instance, a domestic animal)’
dùk´r\ı-liê ‘kill with difficulty (for instance, a tiger)’
The ‘ease’ suffix is used with transitive verbs, and may indicate that the ref-erent of the O NP is small; for instance mêl¯ı-s¯@ ‘climb a small hill’, pêmhè-s¯@
‘extinguish (a small fire)’.
19.13 Evidentiality
Around one quarter of the world’s languages include in their grammar an evidentiality system (discussed in§§1.5–6). For each statement made, there must be obligatory specification of the source of information on which it is based. There may be just a two-term system {eyewitness, non-eyewitness}, as in Jarawara—see (15) in§19.3.1 and (23) in§19.3.2—or else {reported; every-thing else} as in Estonian.
At the opposite extreme are evidentiality systems with five terms. There is a particular concentration of these in languages spoken in the Vaupes River basin, which spans the Brazil/Colombia border. The system may have originated in Tucanoan languages, and has now diffused into neighbouring languages from the Makú family and into Tariana, from the Arawak family.
In Tariana, tense and evidentiality are fused into one set of clitics (Aikhenvald 2003: 289–323, 326–7):
19.14 summary 39
(68) remote recent evidentiality
past past present (with central meanings)
=na =ka =naka visual: speaker has seen it, or speaker takes full responsibility for statement
=mhana -mahka =mha non-visual: speaker has heard, smelt, tasted, or felt (but not seen) it; for example, a phone ringing
=sina =sika — inferred, generic: not seen, but inferred on the basis of general knowledge
=nhina =nihka — inferred, specific: not seen but inferred from specific evidence (for example, the remains of a person are found floating on a lake in which an evil snake is known to live, and the speaker infers that the snake killed the person)
-pidana -pidaka -pida reported: when someone else informed the speaker of it
It will be seen that the full five-term system only applies for the two past tenses.
For present, inferred specifications are not appropriate. And no evidentiality applies for definite future, marked by suffix -de, or for less definite future, suffix -mhade. Interrogative clauses in past tense employ a three-term system {visual, non-visual, inferred}; for present tense there is no inferred choice in interrogatives, as there is not in declaratives. And there is a special ‘reported imperative’, marked by -pida, meaning ‘do what someone else told you to do’.
The wide range of grammatical systems of evidentiality has only been hinted at here. Aikhenvald (2004) provides a detailed and comprehensive survey of types of system, their realizations and meanings, how they intersect with other parts of the grammar, and their origin. The interested reader is directed to her inclusive and incisive account.
19.14 Summary
Every language has some grammatical and lexical means of describing non-spatial setting, although the parameters expressed, and their realization, differ
enormously. This chapter deals with relevant grammatical systems, with occa-sional comments on lexical resources.
Many (but not all) languages include in their grammar a tense system. This may have just two terms—future/non-future or, more commonly, past/non-past. A fairly small number of languages have a three-term system: past, present, and future. There may be several divisions within past tense, and sometimes also several within future. There may be, in a subordinate clause,
‘relative tense’, indicating time with respect to the time of the main clause.
One important distinction is between ‘realis’ (things which are believed to have happened or be happening) and ‘irrealis’ (roughly, things which have not yet happened). Within irrealis there may be a number of modalities, such as prediction, obligation, necessity, and ability. In some languages, reference to future time is through a term in the tense system, in others through a modality.
Other parameters of non-spatial setting include: degree of certainty, phase (starting, continuing, finishing), completion, boundedness, temporal extent, and speaker’s view of the composition of an activity. There may also be speci-fication of one or more of degree, frequency, speed, and ease. Evidentiality can also be conveniently included under ‘non-spatial setting’.