Telicizing light verbs in Hill Mari: Semantics and distribution
This article deals with semantics and distribution of the light verbs keäš ‘to go’, koltaš ‘to send’, šuaš ‘to throw’ and šə̈ ndäš ‘to put’ in Hill Mari. Light verbs are verbs that have lost their lexical meaning and thus cannot denote a situation on their own. They function as actional modifiers, governing the lexical verbs (in our case, in the form of a converb) and forming so-called complex predicates, i.e. constructions that consist of two verbal forms but denote a single event. The author describes semantics of four mentioned light verbs, which all form complex predicates with punctual interpretation, but differ in terms of distribution and semantic properties of a described point. Light verbs keäš ‘to go’ and koltaš ‘to send’ form complex predicates that denote a culmination point of an event: starting point for states, endpoint for processes and point per se for punctual predicates. However, the distribution of these light verbs is almost complementary: keäš ‘to go’ combines only with patientive lexical verbs, while koltaš ‘to send’ combines only with the verbs except for patientive ones. Three more complicated cases are also described: impersonal verbs, inchoatives in -em and detransitives in -alt. Light verb šuaš ‘to throw’ combines only with a subset of transitive light verbs and has two meanings: exhaustiveness of a process or affectedness of a patient. Light verb šə̈ ndäš ‘to put’ denotes a contextually relevant point of sufficiency of an action and combines only with verbs that have a durative interpretation. The meaning of the light verbs šuaš and šə̈ ndäš are also compared with the meaning of Russian prefixes iz- and na- that behave similarly with what these light verbs do. Some typological background is discussed in the article as well. Hill Mari data present an interesting information for the theory of the motion verbs grammaticalization in general and is a non-trivial areal phenolmenon: light verbs and complex predicates occur in many Turkic languages, and Hill Mari constructions seem to be loaned from them.