Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Romani dialects: a brief overview
- 3 Historical and linguistic origins
- 4 Descriptive phonology
- 5 Nominal forms and categories
- 6 Verb morphology
- 7 Syntactic typology
- 8 Grammatical borrowing
- 9 Dialect classification
- 10 Romani sociolinguistics
- 11 Language planning and codification
- References
- Index of dialects
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
6 - Verb morphology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Romani dialects: a brief overview
- 3 Historical and linguistic origins
- 4 Descriptive phonology
- 5 Nominal forms and categories
- 6 Verb morphology
- 7 Syntactic typology
- 8 Grammatical borrowing
- 9 Dialect classification
- 10 Romani sociolinguistics
- 11 Language planning and codification
- References
- Index of dialects
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
Summary
The basic blueprint for the Romani verb
The Romani verb, perhaps more than any other grammatical category, reflects the historical changes that have shaped the language: person inflection on the verb is a unique combination of OIA archaism in the present tense conjugation, and a synthetic morphology based on past participles in the past tense, giving what Bubeník and Hübschmannová (1998: 42) describe as a ‘Prakrit-like typology’ of Romani. Derivation patterns are highly synthetic and partly agglutinative and reminiscent of present-day subcontinental Indo-Aryan. Derivation and the structure of tense-aspect-modality are also sensitive to recent contact developments, however; some dialects show a wholesale adoption of productive aktionsart morphology from the contact languages, most notably from Slavic. A remarkable characteristic feature of the Romani verb, like the Romani noun, is the systematic and productive replication of Greek inflectional morphology, which serves to adapt and so also to mark out European loans.
The core of the verb is the lexical root (see table 6.1). Verb morphology is suffixed, with the exception in some dialects of calqued and borrowed aktionsart prefixes (AKT/SLASP). Borrowed lexical roots are followed by loan-adaptation affixes (LOAN). Derivational extensions – INTRANS, TRANS, CAUS, ITER – mark valency alteration, as well as, in some cases, aspectual distinctions such as iterativity or intensity. They typically attach to the lexical root or to the adapted loan root; derivations that draw on historical participles follow a perfective stem extension that is no longer productive for aspect.
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- Information
- RomaniA Linguistic Introduction, pp. 117 - 164Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002