La pluralité interprétative : Aspects théoriques et empiriques (Logiques sociales) (French Edition)

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Neither theory nor methodological techniques substitute for a thorough familiarity with the data, gained from diagnostic tests and data exploration. Visualization techniques such as graphical analysis and simple statistical techniques such as cross-tabulations bring empirical regularities and patterned variation into focus Achen , ; Shalev Data exploration draws attention to potential causal heterogeneity, non-linear relationships, interaction effects, and other aspects of the data that are obscured by more sophisticated multivariate techniques.

Thus thorough data exploration contributes to theory testing and development by complementing more sophisticated forms of data analysis and drawing attention to empirical patterns that call out for theoretical explanation. State officials, or those who control state power, can be as predatory as the most self-serving and avaricious capitalists. Ostrom in Agilica, , p. Hollard et Sene , p. Il y a donc ici un contresens dommageable. I would be very reluctant to say that. We might usefully think about combinations of private and public economies existing side by side.

Various forms of communal or public ownership may exist apart from state-ownership. Markets are diverse and complex entities. Markets for different types of goods and services may take on quite different characteristics. Some may work well under the most impersonal conditions. Others may depend upon personal considerations involving high levels of trust among trading partners.

Or, comme le rappellent Ostrom et Hess , p. Pour Frischmann , p. The usefulness of the formal-informal dichotomy has constantly been debated in the field of economics, leading to a reconsideration of the conceptual and empirical basis of the formal-informal divide, and the assessment of its policy implications.

Instead, the terminology of informal-formal can be used to characterize a continuum of the reach of official intervention in different economic activities, especially since official statistics already use variants of such a criterion. Families, voluntary associations, villages, and other forms of human association all involve some form of self-government. Conventional collective-action theory predicts that these problems will not be solved unless an external authority determines appropriate actions to be taken, monitors behavior, and imposes sanctions.

Debating about global efforts to solve climate-change problems, however, has yet not led to an effective global treaty. Fortunately, many activities can be undertaken by multiple units at diverse scales that cumulatively make a difference. I argue that instead of focusing only on global efforts which are indeed a necessary part of the long-term solution , it is better to encourage polycentric efforts to reduce the risks associated with the emission of greenhouse gases. Polycentric approaches facilitate achieving benefits at multiple scales as well as experimentation and learning from experience with diverse policies E.

Cela fait partie des enjeux pour la suite de la recherche. The Challenges of Social Reproduction , London: Level B speakers are better in their second language than in Anong. Level C speakers are only able to use daily greetings or a few everyday phrases and, thus, are unable to use Anong to express themselves adequately and completely.

Their Anong frequently includes words from their second language. They only use a limited number of Anong vocabulary items, with much of the basic vocabulary missing. Their pronunciation of Anong is inaccurate. In contrast, they are very fluent in their second language. Level D respondents have essentially lost their mother tongue, although some can still understand a little, but they can no longer speak their mother tongue.

In fact, some have completely lost their Anong. Examination of the Anong column shows some 62 individuals in Mugujia village are still fluent in Anong using the criteria above. However, as Sun a: As of , these 62 are the last fluent speakers—all of them now over Sun also found some 19 semi-fluent speakers in the Mugujia sample and outside of the Mugujia area there are semi-fluent speakers left, in his estimation roughly a: In sum, as of there were roughly 62 fluent Anong speakers and perhaps a little over three hundred semi-fluent speakers remaining.

Fluency rates in Anong, Lisu, and Chinese. For instance, for Level C, Sun says that they are very fluent in their second language; for these speakers, perhaps Lisu was their first language.

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For Level D, Suns talks about speakers losing their first language; it is likely that they never spoke Anong fluently. However there is no reason to question Sun as he observes a: As the next column indicates, of the Anong surveyed including the 62 fluent speakers , 96 of them—all but 8—are fluent in Lisu. All 8 of those not fluent in Lisu were elderly people who rarely went out. Thus, as Sun notes, that even in the village where the highest concentration of Anong speakers was found, the proficiency and level in Lisu has already surpassed that of Anong.

Further, as he notes, almost all the Anong, including most of the fluent speakers, can speak Lisu and most can speak it better than Anong. The situation with Chinese, the final pair of columns, seems quite different. As a consequence of this schooling, fluent and semi-fluent speakers of Chinese had more opportunities for interaction outside the village.

Although clearly not the same thing, usage patterns do correlate with the loss of fluency as the loss of domains of use restricts opportunities for contact with the language. As Sun observed, in Mugujia village it was possible to hear conversations in Anong, although even here most people spoke in Lisu. Outside of Mugujia village Anong usage falls off sharply. Although Anong speakers also live in other villages around Mugujia-Kashi, Muleng, Lagagong, Aniqia, and Lahaigon, in these areas the Anong often are less concentrated, living interspersed with concentrations of Lisu or with people of other nationalities.

In these areas, Sun a: Among the slightly younger speakers, the Anong in their 50s or 60s, only a handful could still speak their mother tongue even at the semi- fluent level. In these areas, Lisu was the language used for daily communication. Demographics, usage, and restricted access. As Sun suggests a: The Anong have interacted with various ethnic groups in the Nujiang River area, but especially with the Lisu. In conversations, unless all individuals spoke Anong fluently, the common language would, of course, have been Lisu. In the case of intermarriage where an Anong had married someone from another group, the same pattern held: His assistant was fluent in Anong, but his wife was Lisu.

They had been married 30 years, but even after 30 years, she spoke only a little Anong and even that rarely. Lisu was the common language in the family: Occasionally, the father would use a little Anong at home, but they would still answer in Lisu. In sum, Anong tends to be restricted to situations where all participants speak it fluently: Thus, only fluent Anong speakers tend to have access to Anong; those less fluent in Anong only have very restricted access to the language. One mechanism involved in the loss of Anong is simple replacement, generally by Lisu, a development undoubtedly exasperbated by limited usage and limited access to Anong, facilitated by restricting the domains in which Anong is used.

Anong forms that are used infrequently are more easily forgotten; Lisu forms that are used frequently are more readily retrieved. With less frequent usage, replacement should go up; with less proficiency, replacement should go up. Other factors also come into play; one is attitudinal. Sun a notes that many of the best educated Anong are relatively indifferent to the impending loss of Anong, expressing the view that not only is this the general trend but also noting that they realize that there is little they could do about it in any case. It is worth noting that, while Anong is their first language, the language they are losing is neither their only language, nor their most useful language, nor even the language that they are most fluent in; almost all Anong speak Lisu better than Anong and use it for more purposes.

However, it is only in the last 30 years or so that the decline in the numbers of speakers and the increasingly restrictive usage patterns have produced the massive restructuring of Anong, not just in its causatives, but in all its systems. Thus, it is obvious that the changes are a response to language contact and subsequent changes in usage patterns. It is clear that the older generation of Anong speakers is the last generation to successfully learn Anong. The middle-aged and younger speakers have not done so.

And, as already observed, this failure to learn Anong correlates with the rapid restructuring and with the increasingly restricted usage and access. In this sense, access to Anong has become too restricted to be successfully passed on; the middle-aged and the younger Anong do not seem to be learning it. The severely limited access might provide a key to understanding the nature and direction of the restructuring. An examination of the restructuring Anong causatives reveals a series of changes that, although they occurred unusually rapidly, are widely attested throughout other Tibeto-Burman languages.

For instance, all of the following developments are found in other Tibeto-Burman languages: Complicating the picture, however, is the side-by-side existence of an older pattern often accompanied by more than one newer form. The path of change may reflect a path found in first language acquisition: Initially, the learner seems to simply acquire morphology as a series of individual tokens. At a later stage, learners often recognize a morphological pattern, and, in part, restructure earlier forms on the basis of their generalizations—in the case of causatives by putting the prefix before the basic root.

Later, some phonetically motivated changes that occurred in the token stage of acquisition are at least partially undone when the learner recognizes the morphological pattern, in the case of causatives putting the prefix before the basic root—thus, connecting in some sense the unprefixed root with the prefixed root. This second stage, generalizing the pattern, has a tendency to undo the phonetic effect of the prefix on the root initial: In Anong, however, the younger learners of Anong seem to have never gotten beyond the stage of learning individual tokens—essentially because they lacked sufficient access to language.

The result was the connection between the basic root and the causative root was lost. The fact that Lisu uses a lexical approach too probably played a minor role, but the major impetus to restructuring came from increasingly restricted access to the language, a restriction that made the morphological patterns too rare and thus too obscure to learn. The phonetic tendencies explain how the changes took place; the loss of sufficient access to the language explains why it was in the last forty years that they occurred.

Even among those fluent in Anong, their Lisu is more fluent than their Anong with the exception of several elderly, essentially house-bound Anong. Thus, Anong is no longer a language with a well-defined function, and it is certainly not a language used with outsiders. Eastern Cham, a Chamic language of Vietnam Cham has been spoken on the coast of Vietnam for over two thousand years; nonetheless, Cham is still linguistically transparent. For instance, overt marking of morphology and syntax, and in cases where grammaticalization of a morpheme has occurred the source morpheme is almost always still present.

Some of this transparency, however, seems to reflect earlier language contact. It is clear that the language was under intense contact with Mon-Khmer languages of Vietnam overwhelmingly Bahnaric; Sidwell, p. The linguistic evidence makes it clear Thurgood that there was widespread bilingualism between the first Chamic speakers and Mon-Khmer MK speaking peoples. Certainly the 25 As Brunelle suggested p.

Doris Walker Blood The significance of this, as Brunelle points out and the Bloods were aware Blood , , , is that this particular variety probably reflects a variety of the language that was already falling out of use in the s. It would be after that the dominance of Chamic would have begun to wane, but it is likely that various groups fled to Cambodia at different times. Brunelle also suggests, quite plausibly, that such a scenario could explain the surprising dialectal diversity in Cambodian Cham. In addition, examination of the phonology of Proto-Chamic suggests something about the language use patterns at the time of the formation of PC.

The inherited PC main syllable vowels? PC main syllable vowels, inherited and borrowed. In this case enough non-tutored adult learners, Mon-Khmer speakers, began to use Chamic to provide not only some of the impetus for the restructuring of the vowel system, but also to help simply the grammatical system. Whether these Mon-Khmer speakers shifted to Chamic or simply became bilingual is probably not of major importance; both conditions would most likely have produced similar outcomes. Other factors undoubtedly played a role.

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Until quite recently when the Eastern Cham increasingly began to learn Vietnamese, Eastern Cham was the dominant language for most of the Eastern Cham speakers, serving both as a language of the home and the village. However, as Brunelle argues p. Sidwell , argues that it was likely that Cham was a lingua franca in the Central Highlands during some periods, but there is no clear evidence of shift to Cham after the Proto- Chamic stage.

In any case, it would be difficult to argue on the basis of this to argue for shift in numbers significant enough to bring about structural change. In any case, it is clear from the linguistic record that contact restructured PC; it is not as clear what effect the two thousand years of language shift and bilingualism that occurred after PC had, contra my earlier writings, because we know too little about the patterns and amount of shift and too little about the functioning of Cham as a lingua franca. However, what still remains to be explained is the continued transparency of the language structures.

The morphemes of Eastern Cham are never less than a syllable and, aside from the possibility that the causative marking pa- is still marginally productive, the morphemes are overwhelmingly separate words Thurgood This paper focuses on much older developments. There is little morphology: Except where subject deletion serves to mark cohesion between clauses, subjects are retained. The genitives are marked by simple juxtaposition, with the head noun first and the genitive following. Most other sentence types are minimally altered variants of the declarative clause, generally 27 Many of the structures of Eastern Cham are semantically compositional, that is, the meaning of the whole is predictable from the sum of the parts.

The assumption being made is that semantically compositional parts of the grammar are easier to learn and are, all things being equal, learned early by those acquiring a second language.

As might be expected, questions follow the same word order as the corresponding declarative sentences. Questions answerable with a yes or no typically are signalled with nothing more than a rise in intonation on the last element in the sentence Doris Blood Where explicitly marked, modality is indicated by an abundance of sentence final particles. Interclausal cohesion is accomplished by heavy reliance on juxtaposition augmented at times by the deletion of the coreferential subject to show cohesion between two clauses.

Clause-final particles may also be used to mark interclausal cohesion. Transparency is further attained by a strong preference for chronological sequencing. Only subject relative clauses occur, and even these are restricted in the materials examined to designation of locations, times, and the like. As with clausal cohesion subject relative clauses delete the coreferential subject.

Serial verb patterns exist, involving the deletion of co-referential subjects and the juxtapositions overwhelmingly but not exclusively match the chronology of the events. Eastern Cham with its rigid SVO order and its preference for semantically compositional structures devotes a minimum of special syntactic machinery to discourse concerns: The presentative clauses or, existential clauses introduce new entities onto the main stage. Left-dislocation, as the term indicates, involves movement of an object to the beginning of the clause.

Most of the participant tracking in the text is done by indexicals—kinship terms which are used pronominally with humans to index personal and social identity, and by classifiers occurring neither with numbers or other modification, which are used with other animates and objects to designate things already established in the discourse. Much more rarely pronouns are used but in the texts typically only when no possibility of ambiguity exists, usually because just a single major participant is being tracked. In short, what marks Eastern Cham is its semantic compositionality, its relative lack of morphological marking, and its high dependence on chronological sequencing.

The source morphemes still exist as such and the path of development is transparent, and, thus, easily learnable. Conclusions The data in this paper is presented, not for the answers the data provides, but for the questions it asks. Nonetheless, for these languages, it is at least clear that the primary determinants of the paths of change are social factors—the patterns of language use, the stability of bilingualism in various social settings, and, probably, population size, to name only a few.

For Hainan Cham, although the emergence of Chinese as the dominant language seems to have set the changes in motion, its stability lies in its function as the language of the home and the village. For Anong, the switch to Lisu in virtually every domain has led to the total restructuring of Anong—only a handful of the oldest speakers, those with less access to Lisu and less proficiency in it, have managed to avoid major restructuring.

Here, the restructuring of Anong has been promoted by the prominence of Lisu and by the fact that Anong is generally only used to talk to other Anong speakers, and, then, usually only to one of the other 60 or so fluent Anong speakers. All the functions once performed in Anong are now done in Lisu. For Eastern Cham the story is different.

Until the emergence of Vietnamese it was an important language in the region, but it no longer is. However, as Brunelle writes , a, , the language is still very strong in most villages of Ninh Thuan and in the north of Binh Thuan. Brunelle notes that the only area where the language seems to be losing ground is in the village is Southern Binh Thuan close to Phan Thiet , where villages are mixed. In general terms, the lack of a function is the greatest threat to these languages. Hainan Cham will survive only until the advantages of living in the village disappear; then the village along with Hainan Cham will disappear.

Eastern Cham will face similar problems; it will take a little longer, but it will also disappear. Before this happens, it is crucial to recognize that each well documented case of language contact provides significant input into our understanding of languages in contact, and thus, in essence, to our understanding of the structural influences of multilingualism. References Alieva, Natalia F. Morphemes in Contemporary Spoken Cham: Qualitative and Quantitative Alternations. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale The progress of monosyllabicization in Cham as testified by field materials.

Grammaire de la langue chame. Barnard, Joseph Terence Owen. A handbook of the Rawang dialect of the Nung language, containing a grammar of the language, colloquial exercises and a vocabulary with an appendix of Nung manners and customs. Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, Burma. A Cham colony on the island of Hainan.

Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 4: A tonal Cham colony on Hainan. Clause and sentence final particles in Cham. Pacific Linguistics Series A. Asian Culture 3 Some aspects of Cham discourse structure. The ascendancy of the Cham script: International Journal of the Sociology of Language Register in Eastern Cham: Phonological, Phonetic and Sociolinguistic approaches.

Language Documentation and Conservation Monosyllabicization in Eastern Cham. Diglossia and Monosyllabization in Eastern Cham: Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages. Proto-Chamic and Acehnese mid vowels: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies Chinese Epigraphic Materials in Indonesia, Vol. Pidginization and creolization of language. Tones of some languages in Hainan. La tonologie des langues de Hai-nan. Case Studies in Transitivity. Proto-Chamic phonologic word and vocabulary.

La pluralité interprétative: Aspects théoriques et empiriques (Logiques sociales) (French Edition)

Tonality in Austronesian Languages. University of Hawaii Press. The Loloish Tonal Split Revisited. The genealogical affiliation of the language of the Hui people in Sanya Hainan. Bulletin of the Central Institute of Minorities 3: The origins of the tones of the Kam-Tai languages. The Huihui language of the Hui nationality of Yaxian, Hainan. Le Panduranga Campa Le Campa et le Monde Malais.

In; Anthony Reid ed. The Background to the Aceh Problem. Sejarah Melayu The Malay Annals. The Mon-Khmer substrate in Chamic: Chamic, Bahnaric and Katuic contact. The origins of the Chamic lexicon: Observations of its path of gradual decline and loss. The category of causative verbs in Tibeto-Burman languages. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area A description of Anong.

Institute of Minority Studies. A grammar of Anong: Language death under intense contact. Notes on the origins of Burmese creaky tone. The aberrancy of the Jiamao dialect of Hlai: Radical typological restructuring in Utsat: From disyllabic and atonal to monosyllabic and tonal. The development of the Chamic vowel system: From Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects: Berkeley Linguistics Society The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar. London - New York: Routledge Language Family Series, Routledge. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society Insights from Zheng and from Summer fieldwork.

Studies in mainland Austronesian languages. Contact induced variation and syntactic change in the Tsat of Hainan. David Bradley, Randy J. Papers on variation and change in the Sinophere and the Indosphere in honour of James A. Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies.

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Complementary sources of change. Iwasaki Shoichi et al. A further discussion of the position of Huihui speech and its genetic relationship, Minzu Yuwen 6: Nous avons, par exemple: Charles Bailleul nous indique que la traduction bambara de Sag. Sa maison est au village milieu de lui et Cet homme tronc de lui est gros. Nous avons, en italien: Il nostro libro, en espagnol: On a, par exemple: En effet, contrairement au dioula, le bambara Mali , distingue deux formes: On a ainsi, en contraste avec les phrases 4 et 5: La fonction de sujet, en particulier, est souvent impossible: Dans une autre optique, nos analyses rejoignent celles de C.

Certaines convergences sont indiscutables. Description de la variation: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Cahiers de l'Institut de Linguistique de Louvain Filiations, ruptures, et reconstitution de langues. Journal of French Language Studies Conventions for interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses.

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

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Une promotion pour les locatifs en abidjanais? Findings and Problems, The Hague: The purpose of this paper is to describe this passive and to compare and contrast its function with that of the more common morphological passive. This paper will explore issues of grammaticalization as well as typological studies of the passive to put these hypotheses into a proper diachronic and synchronic perspective. A tentative proposal is drawn up for the functions of the Chontal passive and passive-like constructions, as well as indications for further research to better establish these claims.

Introduction Periphrastic passive constructions involve auxiliation, a diachronic process whereby a lexical verb becomes bleached of its semantic meaning and acquires a grammatical function. This paper is an exploration of a case of auxiliation through language contact in Chontal Mayan. One example of contact-induced change in the meaning of a passive comes from Mandarin Chinese. Blake provides further examples where European influence has expanded the use of existing passives in Asian languages.

Mayan languages prototypically mark any changes in transitivity with a verbal affix that marks the new derivation. The fourth branch of the Mayan family, Western Mayan, is located in the Mexican states of Chiapas and Tabasco as well as western Guatemala. Chontal is part of this Western grouping and is spoken in the state of Tabasco; the dialect under consideration is spoken in the municipio of Nacajuca north of the state capital of Villahermosa. Like other Mayan languages it is an ergative language that uses absolutive markers for pronominal intransitive subjects and transitive objects and ergative markers for pronominal transitive subjects and possessors.

In these examples the completive is expressed with a null morpheme. In the incompletive the Set A marker references the intransitive argument, while in the completive a Set B marker references it: Like other Mayan languages, Chontal is sensitive to the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs as well as root and derived verbs.

Thus a root intransitive adds a suffix -o or -e to express the incompletive: The Set B third person marker is a null morpheme. All other letters in the writing system used for Chontal have the same value as in Spanish. These voice changes are typically morphological in nature in that they are created by the addition of an affix.

Because it is transitive, one can see how this verb could grammaticalize with or without Spanish language contact into an auxiliary for a periphrastic passive and is thus fundamentally different from the Chontal construction involving intransitive x-. Good overviews of voice in Mayan languages are in Aissen and Dayley The English translations are my own.

Thus there is always the option of indicating the agent, as shown in Uses of the Chontal Periphrastic Passive During field work in Mexico for the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica I came across an example of the periphrastic passive construction that is the topic of this paper. A careful search of the literature revealed that the only discussion of this construction is a passing mention in Knowles Significantly, the Chontal she described over 25 years ago is of a variety of the language that is fairly different from that of my consultant.

She describes this construction as an agentless, or impersonal, expression; her example is in Unlike the construction described by Knowles, the agent is allowed. In the previous examples x- has been used in the completive. If the incompletive is used, the result is a future passive. Auxiliation through language contact. Spanish Passive In Chontal this periphrastic passive exists alongside the morphological passive. This process of renewal appears to be happening in Chontal. It would be worthwhile to investigate further to see if definiteness plays a role in selection of either the morphological or periphrastic passive.

It is possible that the consultant simply added this detail and that it has no bearing on the passive. Like a corresponding Spanish or English construction, the above sentence could imply either futurity or movement. Siewierska notes that grammaticalized auxiliaries often carry an allusion to their former lexical meaning In Chontal a similar construction is found with a defective verb that often acts more like a particle: They point out that such constructions are only available in the third person: In such a construction no copula appears and the absolutive marker is attached directly to the participle: Chontal x- has regular inflection for all persons and aspects and is a good base to carry this information as an auxiliary verb.

A possible way to test this hypothesis would be 1 to see if the periphrastic is used more in the past tense; i. If Chontal were shown to have a similar preference in its periphrastic construction, we could take this preference as supporting evidence for passive x- as a loan calque from Spanish. In fact, Spanish does have various constructions that are used to express degrees of involvement by an agent.

For example, Spanish has a construction that uses the reflexive to express a passive or mediopassive meaning. If there is no agent involved or implied, this passive reflexive is the preferred form. In Chontal it seems that the periphrastic passive with x- is preferred when an agent is clearly involved. An agent can be introduced, however, without any change in the verbal morphology: This is the common pattern in most Mayan languages.

Comparative Perspectives It is useful to take into consideration comparative data to explore the possibility that the periphrastic passive evolved through contact. In his study of passive grammaticalization, Haspelmath Of these, he found that only 31 had a passive. These 31 had 39 grammatical morphemes that he divided in the following manner: In most languages, the passive is formed by adding a passive affix to the verb.

Spanish and is rare outside this family.

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What would be the functional purpose of such a syntactic borrowing? Innovating changes are what he calls the loss or innovation of grammatical functions. An example of this would be the loss of the dual grammatical category in most Indo-European languages. Conservative changes or mutations, as Benveniste terms them , on the other hand, replace a grammatical category expressed through a morpheme with a new periphrastic construction.

In other words, the form changes, but the grammatical function itself remains. The Chontal periphrastic passive is of the second type, as it exists alongside a quite productive morphological passive. At this point the Chontal periphrastic passive appears much less frequently than the morphological passive. Its function frequently seems to be similar to that of the traditional passive construction. At the same time, one suspects that the two constructions are not equal, but that one is marked and the other unmarked. The marked construction would have more restricted or specialized functions.

When asked to extract the underlying patient for questioning, he clearly preferred the morphological passive: The unacceptability of such a construction could be due to kune being used as an interrogative for both patients and agents. When the demoted agent is questioned, the periphrastic passive is the only acceptable form: By whom was the blood drunk? The antipassive is used in other Mayan languages to extract agents for questioning, topicalization or relativization.

The periphrastic passive could then have the function of taking up where the obsolete antipassive left off. Recall the second example from Las doce verdades: It is clear from the discourse context why the passive is preferred: Changing a transitive verb into an intransitive verb is a means of foregrounding the important information. In his study of preferred argument structure, Du Bois points out that the choice of an intransitive or transitive verb is a means of managing information flow If the clause were in the active voice, there would be unnecessary emphasis on the marshes and we would perhaps lose track of the topic that matters i.

While this Spanish construction is not a true passive, it is functionally similar to this construction; its chief purpose is to foreground the object and background the subject. This pseudo-passive is found in many European languages when one wishes to background an unknown or unimportant agent.

In such cases it is possible to use a generic, non-referential they. There is some evidence that this use of the generic plural third person is being grammaticalized in another Mayan language, the Kaqchikel language Eastern Mayan of Guatemala. Recall the pair of standard Kaqchikel active-passive sentences discussed at the beginning of this paper: They give the following example: In Chontal the availability of the periphrastic passive could allow the older morphological passive to become less important.

If the periphrastic has a preference for implying an agent, the k passive could be developing into a more impersonal passive. In almost all instances, this passive is translated into Spanish with the active voice with a generic third person: Another observation that seems to support this view is the frequent usage of a passive clause as a noun or an adjective where the agent is necessarily unimportant and, in fact, syntactically cumbersome to express: As stated previously, most of the Mayan languages have an antipassive as well as a passive; they also have a distinction between an absolute passive where the demoted agent is not mentioned and a passive where the demoted agent is still present.

If Chontal has no antipassive and only one passive k for root and int for derived , the periphrastic passive, while overlapping functionally in many ways with the other construction, could be filling an expressive need. This competition allows, even encourages the recession or loss of older forms. Textual evidence provides strong support for this view of coexisting competing forms and constructions, rather than a cycle of loss and renewal. In other words, the different functions I am proposing are probably tendencies or preferences rather than rules.

The clues to its usage are based on 1 its usage with an oblique agent and, 2 its translation into Spanish. Based on these observations, the following is a tentative description of the various functions of the passives and passive-like constructions in Chontal: Chontal form Spanish equivalent Function Periphrastic passive: Conclusion and Directions for further research Speakers of Chontal have a wide variety of transitivity reducing-constructions available to them, ranging from stative constructions based on participles, periphrastic constructions utilizing auxiliary verbs, and morphological passives.

I have presented four reasons for this: This last claim is still tentative and needs further field work data to better support it; to test it I would need a larger amount of data in a discourse context. Because the passive is a discourse-driven construction, any isolated examples run the risk of being unnatural.

It is particularly difficult to tell if the oblique phrase is mandatory or optional in isolated contexts. We also need to take into account sociolinguistic factors. It would be interesting to see how widespread the periphrastic passive is and what variables figure into its use: Understanding the interaction of these factors would give us a better understanding of the diffusibilty of passives in general as well as special mechanisms, such as replication, that may drive this process of auxiliation. Mutations of linguistic categories. Directions for Historical Linguistics: University of Texas Press.

Global trends in language.

Numéros en texte intégral

A new passive in Kaqchikel. Bruyne , Jacques de. A comprehensive Spanish Grammar. Voz y ergatividad en idiomas Mayas. The discourse basis of ergativity. Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective. The grammaticization of passive morphology. Organization, 12 3 , , p. European Group for Organizational Studies, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, Management Communication Quarterly , 24 3 , , p.

Presses Universitaires de Lyon, , p. Logiques, contraintes et crises. Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass,

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