Non Canonical Valency Patterns in Basque, Variation and Evolution

Céline Mounole (1) , Denis Creissels (2)

1 IKER - Centre de recherche sur la langue et les textes basques
2 UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2

In standard Basque and in most present-day dialects, coding frames that were exceptional in Old Basque are attested by a sizeble proportion of the verbal lexicon, which results in a system characterized by a typologinally uncommon type of split intransitivity. In this paper, we discuss the factors that may have payed a role in the expansion of ergative encoding and more specifically of the coding frames and , which originally were clearly non-canonical. We argue that the situation observed in present-day Basque implies a change in the constraints underlying the organization of the valency properties of Basque verbs or in their relative ranking.

Domains: Linguistics

Céline Mounole, Denis Creissels. Non Canonical Valency Patterns in Basque, Variation and Evolution. Hellan, Lars; Malchukov, Andrej; Cennamo, Michela. Contrastive Studies in Verbal Valency, 237, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017, Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 978-90-272-5720-8 978-90-272-6609-5. ⟨10.1075/la.237.05mou⟩. ⟨hal-02551873⟩