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Itziar Laka
Euskara Pages
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Scroll down to read about the
following:
History of the grammar of Euskara
Sentence
Noun phrase
Cases & propositions
Verb and its morphology
Inflection
SOURCE:
This page is reproduced here in case the original
location is no longer maintained at:
http://www.ehu.es/grammar/ (March 2005)
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Brief grammar of
Euskara, the Basque language |
1. ABOUT THIS GRAMMAR:
This is a short grammar of the Basque language, or
Euskara as it is called by its speakers. What
follows is a partial description of the syntax of
Euskara.
The text has been arranged in the following fashion:
there is an index where you can find the
distribution of topics. Within each of the topics,
an effort has been made to arrange information from
general to specific, so that as you read into a
given section, you will get into more details about
the topic being under discussion.
This grammar hopes to be useful to a wide variety of
users. Therefore, it will probably not satisfy
anyone completely: Those who want a quick 'feel' for
the language will be disappointed by the slow and
messy details the text dives into. Those who want a
detailed, professional description will be
disappointed by the lack of depth in the discussion.
The text hopes to sit somewhere in the middle, and
if it tells too much to those who want to know a
little, and too little to those who want to know a
lot, then it will have done its job.
On more than one occasion, the description will
probably state what seems obvious to the
professional of language, but perhaps not so obvious
to the curious general reader, and hopefully more
than once the reverse will happen too; every effort
has been made to present all the basic information
that is necessary to grasp the mechanics of Euskara,
paying most attention to the basics, as should be
the case in such a limited text.
The curious and careful reader is sure to construct
many sensible questions that are not answered in the
text, and to the extent of my capacity I have tried
to become an inquisitive reader of this grammar, and
then I have tried to answer the questions that
seemed most obvious to me. No doubt, many have
escaped my fingers, and I would be happy to hear
about them from you.
The informed reader who already knows Euskara or
about Euskara will find wholes, exceptions that are
not mentioned, constructions that are not described,
dialectal variants that are completely missing. I
have attempted to explain the central facts of
Euskara to those who are not acquainted with the
language, and I have tried to keep it simple. Any
deep, serious and thorough grammar of a language
must include all exceptions, constructions and
variants, but this one is more like a short visit to
the language of the Basques, and thus not everything
could be told. At least I hope it manages to make a
few readers curious enough to want to look for more
in better sources.
About glosses. If you are a really methodical
reader, of the kind that actually reads the glosses
of the examples, you will notice that the same word
may appear glossed in different ways in various
parts of the grammar. The reason is that glosses
have been kept to the simplest, in order to make the
examples easier to read. Since the text provides
explanations of examples, the parts not deemed
relevant are often glossed rather generally. Details
about various parts are provided in different
sections. For instance, you may notice that the
determiner a is sometimes glossed as 'the',
sometimes as 'det'. The reason becomes clear, I
hope, in the section devoted to the determiner a,
where it is shown that it is not really a definite
article ('the'), but very often it can be translated
as such. In those examples where the determiner a
was not the issue, and where its translation was
indeed 'the', I have chosen to write 'the' in the
gloss, so you can find it easily.
Naming morphemes. You will notice also that I don't
follow the standard practice of attaching a dash in
front of a morpheme when mentioning it. I simply
write the morpheme, or whichever form it takes more
generally, as if I were quoting a word. For
instance, and to continue with the example, I write
about the determiner a, although it is not written
as a separate word, but attached to another one. The
standard use is to refer to it as -a instead. But
since you can see for yourself that it is indeed
attached, I fail to see what is wrong with calling
it determiner a. So I do.
About grammars. A grammar is a rather complex
mechanism, built out of various elements, which are
in turn constructed out of more basic elements, much
in the way the entire universe works. Some of these
units might be familiar to any user (pretty much
anyone who can read knows something about units like
'verb' or 'noun'), but others might only be familiar
to a linguistically educated user (for instance,
elements like 'morpheme', 'anaphoric', 'irrealis' or
'agreement marker'); still there are other elements
that have been recently discovered, and whose very
existence might be under debate within the broader
linguistic community (terms such as 'unnacusative'
or 'complementizer', for instance). This grammar
makes an attempt to provide information at various
levels of linguistic knowledge, and various types of
terms are used, generally the more descriptive ones
at the beginning and the more technical ones as the
discussion progresses. If you are not a linguist,
and not even curious about linguistics, you can
simply skip the discussion if it gets too strange,
and move on.
Apologies. Writing the description of a human
grammar feels like knitting an infinite sweater that
never fits. At some point a decision is made that
this much knitting is enough for the sleeves, and
this much knitting will have to do as far as the
neck is concerned. Grammarians know there is more to
be said about this construction here, and that
further questions could be investigated regarding
that other one there. They might stop and declare a
given text finished, but they know there is much
that was left untouched. In fact, as a grammarian I
have often felt like one of the four blind men that
Buddha introduced to an elephant to illustrate the
complexity of truth, but I was the one who had to
knit a sweater for the elephant on top of it all. So
this sweater will never quite fit, but the hope
still remains that it might at least cover a few
parts of the elephant's humongous body. It is in
this hope that I offer you this forever incomplete
piece of work.
2. LOCATION: where is Euskara spoken?
Euskara is spoken by a population of around 600.000
to 700.000 people.The Basques call themselves
euskaldun, a term that means 'euskara speaker' (for
the names euskara, vasco, vascuence, vascongado, see
Mitxelena (1977:13-16)).
Languages exist in the minds of their speakers, they
do not have a land of their own. Thus, when locating
Euskara on the world's map, we are simply pointing
out those areas where Euskara speakers are more
likely to be found, that is, where Euskara is most
likely to be heard, or where it is most likely to be
used as primary language. In this sense of
geographical location, Euskara is spoken mostly
within the Basque Country (or Euskal Herria in
Euskara). The Basque Country is found in the western
Pyrenees, a land within Spanish borders to the West,
and within French borders to the East. The areas
where native Basque speakers are most likely to be
found covers totally or partially the seven lands of
the Basque Country. From West to East, this area
includes: the land of Biscay (except for the corner
to the west of the city of Bilbao and Bilbao
itself), the Valley of Aramaiona in the northern
side of the land of Alava, the land of Guipuscoa,
the northwestern area of the land of Navarre, the
land of Labourd (except for the urban areas of
Bayonne, Anglet and Biarritz), the land of the Lower
Navarre, and the land of Soule.
3. A LITTLE ABOUT EUSKARA'S HISTORY.
Euskara appears to have always been spoken by a
rather small community, never beyond 600.000 or
700.000 individuals in its known history. In the
Middle Ages, the geographical area where Euskara was
the main language covered all the Basque Provinces
in their entirety, except for the western tip of
Biscay and the southernmost tip of Navarre and Alava.
For some centuries, this area expanded beyond the
Basque Country to the south, into parts of the Rioja
region and north of Burgos. It is also likely that
in the high valleys of the Pyrenees, east of today's
Basque Country, varieties of the language were alive
well into the Middle Ages.
Since the Middle Ages, the area where Euskara is the
main language of communication has shrank
relentlessly. By the XVIIIth century it lost large
parts of the province of Alava, and during the XIXth
century large areas of Navarre lost the language as
well. In contrast to the southern area, were the
language has disappeared increasingly in the last
three centuries, the northern borders of the Euskara
speaking area have remained stable, probably in
relation to the fact that the neighbouring language
was not French but rather Gascon, a very distinct
variety of Occitan. Nowadays, Euskara's territory
has been reduced to Biscay -except the western tip
and the city of Bilbao-, Guipuscoa, the valley of
Aramaio in the north of Alava, the northwestern area
of Navarre and all the Northern Basque Country (the
Basque area within French borders), except for the
urban areas of Bayonne, Anglet and Biarritz.
The oldest traces of Euskara in history are a set of
proper names found in Roman inscriptions in the
Aquitanie. They consist mostly of person and
divinity names, which are easily recognizable given
modern Basque: thus for instance, Andere corresponds
to andere 'woman, lady', and Nescato corresponds to
neskato 'maiden'. There are also a few adjectives
and suffixes that further confirm the fact that
these are the first written traces of Euskara,
dating from the first centuries after Christ.
While up to the present century the predominant and
often only language used in the Euskara speaking
area was Euskara, we cannot say the same about this
century. Nowadays, even within the Euskara speaking
region, a minority of the population knows the
language: only a fourth of the inhabitants of the
Basque country and slightly less than half of the
inhabitants of the Euskara speaking area. However,
the number of speakers is increasing in the younger
generations of the areas that include Euskara at
school, and there is also a large number of adults
who have learned or are learning the language (see
Intxausti (1990)
for more details).
0. Basic elements in the
sentence: a few examples
1. Order of phrases in the
sentence.
1.0. Neutral word order.
1.1. Free word order.
1.2.Galdegaia: the
informationally relevant phrase.
2. Absent phrases.
2.1. In infinitival sentences.
2.2. Absent phrases and
galdegaia.
2.3. Absent pronouns.
3. Types of sentences.
3.1. Declarative sentences.
3.2. Negative sentences.
3.2.1. Negation and word order.
3.2.2. Negation and galdegaia.
3.3. Interrogative sentences.
3.3.1. Yes/no questions.
3.3.2. Partial questions.
3.4. Causative sentences.
3.5. Impersonal sentences.
0.
Basic elements of the sentence: a few examples.
A
declarative sentence in Euskara contains: a verb and
its arguments, an
aspect marker
attached to the verb, and the
verbal inflection,
which contains the
agreement morphemes,
tense, and
modality. It can also contain other phrases, such as
adverbials or
postpositional phrases. Examples are
provided in
(1):
(1)
a.
umea kalean erori da
child-the street-in fall-asp is
'the child fell in the street'
b. emakumeak gizona ikusi du
woman-the-E man-the seen has
'the woman has seen the man'
c. gizonak umeari liburua eman dio
man-the-E child-the-D book-the given has
'the man has given the book to the child'
In
(1a), there is a
sentence constructed with the
intransitive verb
erori 'fall'. The verb is marked for
perfective aspect with the morpheme i; it
denotes a completed event. The
auxiliary verb is
da, a form of izan 'be', which is inflected for
present tense, third person singular. The subject
umea 'the child' is marked with
absolutive case,
which bears a zero morpheme, that is, no manifest
ending for the case. There is also a
locative postpositional phrase kalean 'in
the street'. The word order in (1a) is said to be
neutral, that is, the sentence in (1a) is a natural
answer to a question such as zer gertatu da? 'what
happened?'. In other words, the entire sentence is
informationally relevant.
In
(1b), the sentence
is constructed with a
transitive verb,
ikusi 'to see', which has the
perfective aspectual morpheme i attached.
The
auxiliary verb is a
form of ukan 'have', inflected for present tense,
third person subject, and third person object. The
subject emakumea 'the woman' is marked for
ergative case
(morpheme k), and the object gizona is case marked
absolutive
(morpheme zero). The word order in (1b) is neutral.
In
(1c), the sentence
contains a transitive verb, eman 'give', which has a
variant of the perfective aspectual morpheme,
namely, the final -n on the ver
b. The auxiliary verb carries the inflection, which
in this case is specified for present tense, third
person object, third person
dative and third
person subject. The subject gizona is marked for
ergative case (morpheme k), the dative phrase is
marked for dative case (morpheme i) and the object
is marked for absolutive case (morpheme zero). The
word order in (1c) is neutral.
1.
Order of phrases in the sentence.
1.0. Neutral word order.
The
neutral order of elements in the sentence is the one
illustrated in the examples above
(1a,b,c), and
schematized in
(2):
(2)
[Ergative] [Dative] [Absolutive] [verb + inflection]
That is, given the language typology proposed by
Greenberg, it is standardly assumed that Euskara is
a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) type language (de
Rijk (1969)). Regarding phrases that do
not agree with the verbal inflection, such as
adverbs and postpositional phrases, it is not so
clear what the neutral word order is. For instance,
the
EGLU grammar
provides examples like
(3) as neutral word
orders:
(3)
duela bi ordu sekulako istripua izan da San Martin
kalean
ago two hours huge accident been is Saint Martin
street-in
'there has been a huge accident in Saint Martin
street two hours ago'
where the locative phrase San Martin kalean 'in San
Martin street', follows the ver
b.
This is a possible word order if, as noted by the
EGLU grammar, we get home and want to provide this
information, which is entirely new to our listeners.
In this case, we would be implicitely answering the
question zer gertatu da? 'what happened?', which
triggers neutral word order in the sentence, because
the entire sentence is informationally relevant in
this case.
1.1. Euskara is a free word order language.
Euskara is known to be a 'free word order' language;
this means that the order of the phrases in the
sentence can vary. The variations yield different
informational patterns, as discussed further in
section 1.2. Consider sentence
(1a) above. The
variations on the order of phrases of (1a) shown in
(4) are all
possible:
(4)
a.
kalean umea erori da
street-in child-the-A fallen is
b. umea erori da kalean
c. kalean erori da umea
Sentences with initial verb and auxiliary are also
possible, as shown in
(5a, b). The order
of the phrases following the
verbal complex
allows for variation, as shown in (5b).
(5)
a.
erori da umea kalean
fallen is child-the-A street-in
b. erori da kalean umea
Sentences where the inflected auxiliary precedes the
participle are possible if at least one phrase
precedes the auxiliary, as illustrated in examples
(6a,b). This type
of word order is used mostly in eastern varieties of
Euskara.
(6)
a.
emakumeak du kalean gizona ikusi
woman-the-E has street-in man-the-A seen
'It is the woman who has seen the man in the street'
b.
kalean du emakumeak gizona ikusiko
'It is in the street that the woman will see the
man'
c.
*du emakumeak kalean gizona ikusiko
The
phrase immediately preceding the auxiliary is
emphasized (see the section about
galdegaia). More
than one phrase can precede the auxiliary
(6b), but the
variation where the auxiliary is initial is not
possible
(6c) (The asterisk
in front of the sentence indicates its
ungrammaticality). When the inflected auxiliary
precedes the main verb, any number of phrases can
intervene between the auxiliary and the main verb
(6a,b).
There is one more restriction in word order in
declarative sentences: If the auxiliary follows the
participle, no element can appear between them
(7):
(7)
b.
*erori umea da kalean
fallen child-the-A is street-in
c.
*erori kalean da umea
d.
*erori umea kalean da
In
general, this is the only restriction in the
variation of the order of phrases in matrix
declarative sentences. There are a number of further
word order restrictions in negative sentences.
1.2. Galdegaia: The informationally relevant phrase.
As
mentioned above, the various word orders in the
sentence yield different informational patterns. In
particular, and leaving aside cases of neutral word
orderds discussed previously, the position
immediately preceding the verb is occupied by the
phrase that provides the relevant information in the
sentence. Consider the sentence in
(8), which is
(1c) repeated under
a new number:
(8)
gizonak umeari liburua eman dio
man-the-E child-the-D book-the given has
'the man has given the book to the child'
By
means of
(8) we can provide
information about the entire event, that is, we can
answer the question zer gertatu da? 'what
happened?'. In that case, the entire sentence
constitutes relevant information. But suppose we
knew the man had given something to the child, and
yet we were not certain as to what was given. Then
we could ask the question in
(9):
(9)
zer
eman dio gizonak umeari?
what given has man-the-E child-the-D
'what has the man given to the child?'
and
all the word order variations in
(10) would be
felicitous answers to the question asked:
(10)
a.
liburua eman dio gizonak umeari
b.
liburua eman dio umeari gizonak -
c.
gizonak umeari, liburua eman dio
d.
umeari gizonak, liburua eman dio
e.
gizonak liburua eman dio umeari
f.
umeari liburua eman dio gizonak
All
the sentences in
(10) have two
common properties:
(I)
The element providing the information requested in
the question immediately precedes the verbal
complex.
(II) The element providing the information requested
is pronounced in the same phonological phrase as the
verbal complex, without a break.
This preverbal position is called galdegaia in the
Basque grammatical tradition (Altube
(1929)). The word galdegaia means 'the
questioned element', that is, the element asked
about. In other words, we can say that the galdegaia
is the informationally relevant phrase in the
sentence.
In
eastern dialects, and occasionally in literary
western usage, the galdegaia position precedes the
inflected auxiliary, where the main verb appears
left behind. Examples have been provided in
(6).
Sometimes, the relevant information in the sentence
is not a phrase, but the verb itself. In that case,
the verbal complex, that is, the main verb and the
auxiliary are stressed, separating all other phrases
that might precede with a break:
(11) liburua, eman dio gizonak umeari
An
example like
(11) may be used to
emphasize either the verb itself, or the fact that
the event has indeed taken place. In the first case,
what is emphasized is that what the man has done
with the book is give it to the child, as opposed
to, say, read it. In the second case, what is
emphasized is that the man has indeed given the book
to the child, in case someone was doubting or
denying that the event might have happened.
In
western dialects, the dummy verb egin 'to do, to
make' is inserted between the main verb and the
auxiliary, as in
(12):
(12) gizonak umeari, eman egin dio liburua
Sentences like this unambiguously emphasize the verb
itself. That is,
(12) means that
what the man has done with the book is give it to
the child, and not buy it or burn it or throw it,
for instance. In order to emphasize the actuality of
the event, western dialects unambiguously use the
strategy in
(11).
2.
Absent phrases.
The
phrases that agree with the verb need not be overtly
manifest in the sentence: Ergative, dative and
absolutive noun phrases or pronouns can be absent
and understood. In
(13), we repeat
example
(1c), a sentence
with ergative, dative and and absolutive phrases,
which will be used to illustrate the absence of
verbal arguments:
(13)
gizonak umeari liburua eman dio
man-the-E child-the-D book-the given has
'the man has given the book to the child'
This sentence has been described in
section 0 above. In
example
(14a) below, we see
the same sentence, but now the ergative argument has
been omitted. It is understood that someone gave a
book to the child. In
(14b), the dative
argument is omitted. It is understood that the man
gave a book to someone. In
(14c), the
absolutive argument is omitted. It is understood
that the man gave something to the child.
(14)
a.
umeari liburua eman dio
child-the-D book-the given has
'(someone) gave a book to the child'
b.
gizonak liburua eman dio
man-the-E book-the given has
'the man gave a book (to someone)'
c.
gizonak umeari eman dio
man-the-E man-the-D given has
'the man gave (something) to the child'
More than one of these arguments can be omitted, as
shown in
(15), where all
three are absent.
(15)
eman dio
given has
'(someone) gave (something) (to someone)'
2.1. In infinitival sentences.
It
is generally assumed that the
agreement morphemes
carried by verbal inflection make these omissions
possible. It must be noted, however, that arguments
can also be omitted in infinitival sentences, where
there is no visible agreement morphology, as shown
in the examples in
(16):
(16)
a.
[emakumeak gizonari liburua ematea] nahi du umeak
woman-the-E man-the-D book-the give-inf want has
child-the-E
'The child wants [the woman to give a book to the
man]'
b.
[gizonari liburua ematea] nahi du umeak
man-the-D book-the give-inf want has child-the-E
'The child wants [(someone) to give the book to the
man]'
c.
[liburua ematea] nahi du umeak
book-the give-inf want has child-the-E
'The child wants [(someone) to give the book (to
someone)]'
d.
[ematea] nahi du umeak
give-inf want has child-the-E
'The child wants [(someone) to give (something)(to
someone)]'
The
sentence in
(16a) contains an
infinitival sentence, the object of nahi 'want'. The
infinitival sentence does not contain any visible
agreement morphology. As shown in
(16b), the ergative
argument can be omitted and understood. As shown in
(16c) both the
ergative and dative arguments can be omitted and
understood. As shown by
(16d), all three
arguments can be omitted and understood.
2.2. Absent phrases and galdegaia.
Only phrases that are not informationally relevant
can be absent. In particular, if an argument is the
galdegaia of the sentence, it cannot be
absent, even if it is understood or unambiguously
represented in the verbal morphology. Consider for
instance the example in
(17):
(17)
zuk
umea ikusi duzu kalean
you-E child-the-A seen have-you street-in
'you have seen the child in the street'
this sentence contains a second person singular
pronoun zuk 'you' as subject. The pronoun agrees
with the auxiliary, by means of the morpheme zu
'second person' that appears at the end of the
inflected auxiliary. Now, if the relevant
information of the sentence were the place where the
event took place, we would be implicitely answering
the question in
(18a), and thus
(18b) would be a
felicitous answer, because the phrase kalean 'in the
street' occupies the preverbal position, the
galdegaia position:
(18)
a.
non ikusi duzu umea?
where seen have-you child-the-A
'where have you seen the child?'
b.
kalean ikusi duzu umea
street-in seen have-you child-the-A
'you have seen the child in the street'
in
(18b), the subject
pronoun need not be manifest. It can be omitted. The
object umea 'the child' need not be manifest either,
although the example has chosen to express it. The
relevant piece of information in
(18b), the answer
to
(18a), is the
phrase kalean 'in the street'. Now suppose we were
asking who saw the child, as all the possible
questions
illustrated in
(19) do:
(19)
a.
nork ikusi du umea kalean?
who-E seen has child-the-A street-in
'who has seen the child in the street?'
b.
nork ikusi du kalean umea?
c.
umea kalean nork ikusi du?
d.
kalean umea nork ikusi du?
e.
nork ikusi du kalean?
f.
kalean nork ikusi du?
the
last two examples,
(19e, f) would be
felicitous if we knew that we were talking about a
certain child. The answers to
(19) must include
an overtly expressed phrase corresponding to the
entity that saw the child. In the case we are
considering, the felicitous answers must include the
second person pronoun zu 'you', as the examples in
(20) show:
(20)
a.
zuk ikusi duzu umea kalean
you-E seen have-you child-the-A street-in
'you have seen the child in the street'
b.
zuk ikusi duzu kalean umea
c.
umea kalean zuk ikusi duzu
d.
kalean umea zuk ikusi duzu
e.
zuk ikusi duzu kalean
f.
kalean zuk ikusi duzu
it
would be totally unfelicitous to reply with
sentences such as the ones in
(21). The symbol #
indicates that the sentence is a possible one in
other situations, but is not felicitous as an answer
to
(21):
(21)
a.
#ikusi duzu kalean umea
b.
#ikusi duzu umea kalean
c.
#umea kalean ikusi duzu
d.
#kalean umea ikusi duzu
e.
#umea ikusi duzu kalean
f.
#kalean ikusi duzu umea
g.
#ikusi duzu umea
h.
#ikusi duzu kalean
i.
#umea ikusi duzu
j.
#kalean ikusi duzu
k.
#ikusi duzu
That is, even though all the sentences in
(21) unambiguously
provide the information that 'you saw...', none of
them can be used when the relevant information, or
the galdegaia, is precisely 'you'. Phrases that are
the galdegaia of the sentence cannot be omitted even
if they are unambiguously understood. Phrases that
are not informationally relevant and can be
understood when omitted, are usually not expressed
in actual discourse.
2.3. Absent
pronouns.
Pronouns tend to be absent. Exceptions to this rule
are (a) pronouns that are the galdegaia of the
sentence, as shown immediately above in examples
(19) to
(21), and (b)
pronouns that are used contrastively in the
discourse (see discussion of example
(19-21)).
If
the entire sentence is informationally relevant,
that is, if the sentence implicitely or explicitely
answers the question zer gertatu da? 'what
happened?', pronouns are absent. Consider the
example in
(22):
(22)
opari bat ekarri dizut
present one brought it-have-you-I
'I have brought you a present'
there are two absent pronouns in this sentence: the
first person pronoun that is the subject of the
sentence, and the second person pronoun that is the
recipient of the present. They are manifest in the
agreement morphology,
as noted in the glosses: the morpheme t stands for
the first person pronoun 'I', and the morpheme zu
stands for the second person pronoun 'you'. The
sentence in
(22) is felicitous
used as the beggining of a conversation, for example
if I were entering your appartment for a visit. In
this context, the entire sentence is informationally
relevant, and the appropriate form is the one with
the absent pronouns.
There are cases when pronouns are not absent even
though they are not the galdegaia of the sentence.
In this case, they are used in contrast to some
other entity that has been mentioned or is in the
minds of the participants in the discourse. To see
this, consider the example in
(23):
(23)
nik
opari bat ekarri dizut
I-E present one brought it-have-you-I
'I have brought you a present'
the
only difference between
(22) and
(23) is the
presence of the first person pronoun ni 'I' in the
second example. Note that the pronoun could not be
the galdegaia of the sentence, since it does not
appear immediately preceding the ver
b.
This sentence would be felicitous if, for example,
there were other people who had come or would come
to visit, and I wanted to say something like 'as for
me, I have brought you a present', in a situation
where someone else might have just shown up to wish
you good luck, or to do your groceries, or to tidy
up your place... what
(23) conveys in
that case is that what I am doing is bringing you a
present.
3.Types of sentences.
Sentences can be of various types, and different
descriptions provide different taxonomies of
sentences. Here, we will consider declaratives,
negatives and interrogatives.
3.1. Declarative sentences.
So
far, we have illustrated our discussion of
word order,
galdegaia and
absent phrases
using simple declarative sentences. Thus, we take it
that the main properties of declarative sentences
have been described. Here, other types of sentences
will be described, against the background of the
standard properties of declarative sentences.
3.2. Negative sentences.
Negative sentences in Basque display the negation
word ez 'not' immediately preceding the inflected
auxiliary if there is one
(22a), or the
inflected verb if there is no auxiliary
(22b):
(22)
a.
emakumea ez da etorri
woman-the not is arrived
'the woman has not arrived' >
b.
emakumea ez dator
woman-the not come
'the woman is not coming'
The
negation word ez is written separate from the
inflected auxiliary or verb, but it is
phonologically part of it and they cannot be
separated by any other phrase. The only other
elements that can appear between the negation word
and the inflected verb are certain particles, such
as omen, bide 'uncertain truth value' and ohi 'habituality',
or the interrogative particles ote and al, as shown
in
(23):
(23)
a.
emakumea ez omen da etorri
'apparently, the woman has not arrived'
b.
emakumea ez bide da etorri
'apparently, the woman has not arrived'
c.
emakumea ez ohi da etortzen
'the woman does not usually arrive'
d.
ez ote dator emakumea?
'is the woman perhaps not coming?
e.
emakumea ez al dator?
'is the woman not coming?'
3.2.1. Negation and word order.
Negative sentences present a different word order
from declaratives. This different word order is
manifest when there is an inflected auxiliary and
the sentence is not an embedded one. In main
negative sentences, the inflected auxiliary must
precede the main verb, as already shown in (22a).
Main negative sentences where the inflected
auxiliary follows the main verb are not possible, as
shown in the paradigm in
(24):
(24)
a.
emakumea etorri da
woman-the arrived is
'the woman has arrived'
b.
emakumea ez da etorri
woman-the not is arrived
'the woman hasn't arrived'
c.
*emakumea etorri ez da
The
paradigm shows a declarative sentence, where the
main verb precedes the inflected auxiliary
(24a). In
(24b), the negative
sentence displays the reverse order, where the
negated auxiliary precedes the main ver
b.
Finally, the ungrammatical example in
(24c) shows that
the order available ind eclarative sentences is not
available in negative ones. Word orders like the one
in
(24c) are possible
and sometimes obligatory in embedded negative
sentences, and exclamative negative sentences, as
the examples in
(25) illustrate:
(25)
a.
[etorri ez den] emakumea
arrived not is-that woman-the
'the woman [that has not arrived]'
b.
emakumea etorri ez bada
woman-the arrived not if-is
'if the woman has not arrived'
c.
etorriko ez da ba!
arrive-irr not is indeed
'will (she) not come!'
(of course she will come!)
In
(25a), we find a
relative clause, which precedes its head noun in
Basque; in
(25b) a conditional
sentence, and in
(25c) and
exclamative sentence. All three display a word order
where the negated auxiliary follows the main ver
b.
Finally, regarding the example in
(24c), it must be
said that although it is ungrammatical in modern
Euskara, we find exactly this word order in the
first Basque written sentence that we know about. It
is a negative sentence, written on the corner of a
latin text: guec ajutu ez dugu where the main verb
ajutu, precedes the negation word ez and the
inflected auxiliary dugu 'we have it'. It is not
certain what the meaning of the verb ajutu might
have been. This word order is not too unfrequent
inolder written texts, and it also appears
occasionally in songs, such as this children's
rhyme:
a,
e, i, o, u,
a, e, i, o, u,
ama
meriendea biogu
mommy a snack we need
txokolatea eta opiltxu
chocolate and bread
bestelan eskolan ikasiko ez dogu
otherwise in school learn not will we
A
second property of main negative sentences and their
word order, is that any number of phrases can
appear, in any order, between the negated auxiliary
and the main ver
b.
This is illustrated in the examples in
(26), where we use
the negative version of sentence
(1b) for
illustration:
(26)
a.
emakumeak ez du gizona ikusi
woman-the-E not has man-the seen
'the woman has not seen the man'
b.
ez du emakumeak gizona ikusi
c.
ez du gizona emakumeak ikusi
d.
ez du emakumeak ikusi gizona
e.
ez du gizona ikusi emakumeak
f.
gizona ez du emakumeak ikusi
g.
emakumeak gizona ez du ikusi
h.
gizona emakumeak ez du ikusi
i.
ez du ikusi emakumeak gizona
j.
ez du ikusi gizona emakumeak
As
the permutations of phrases in
(26) illustrate,
all orders of phrases are possible, as long as the
negated auxiliary precedes the main ver
b.
Any number of phrases can intervene between the
negated auxiliary and the main verb, in any order
(26a, b, c, d). Any
number of phrases can precede the negated auxiliary,
in any order
(26a, f, g, h). Any
number of phrases can follow the negated auxiliary,
in any order
(26d, e, i, j).
3.2.2. Negation and
galdegaia.
As
it is usually the case with word-order permutations,
not all variations are identical from an
informational point of view. In negative sentences,
the word order indicates which one is the relevant
part of the sentence that is negated. Before we
enter into considerations about the relation between
the galdegaia phrase and negation, the reader must
be cautioned that this is a complex area, where some
facts are still not very well understood even at a
descriptive level.
There appear to be two galdegaia sites in negative
sentences:
(I)
one site follows the negated auxiliary or verb,
(II) the other one immediately precedes it. Let us
consider them one at a time.
(I)
The phrase following the negated verb or auxiliary
receives a contrastive interpretation. In the case
of a negated auxiliary, this position must precede
the main verb, as in example
(27):
(27)
emakumeak ez du gizona ikusi
woman-the-E not has man-the seen
'the woman hasn't seen the man'
in
this example, what is conveyed is that 'it is not
the man that the woman has seen', and thus it is
very naturally followed by an explanation that
states what the woman has seen, as in
(28):
(28)
emakumeak ez du gizona ikusi, umea baino
woman-the-E not has man-the seen, child-the but
'the woman hasn't seen the man, but the child'
in
this position, the phrase is under the scope of
negation, and negation and focus can be associated,
yielding a contrastive reading.
(II) The position immediately preceding the negated
verb or auxiliary can also behave as a galdegaia, in
the sense that it is the natural position for a
phrase that answers a question. Consider the
question in
(29):
(29)
nor
ez duzu ikusi?
who not have-you seen
'who did you not see?'
a
natural answer to this question is the sentence in
(30):
(30)
Irune ez dut ikusi
Irune not have-I seen
'I haven't seen Irune'
where the phrase answering the question immediately
precedes the negated auxiliary. This phrase must be
pronounced with some stress and within the same
phonological phrase as the negated auxiliary, as in
the case of galdegaia in declarative sentences. In
(30), there is no
contrastive reading; what the sentence conveys is
akin to 'it is Irune that I have not seen'. We may
therefore say that this second galdegaia position is
outside the scope of negation.
3.3. Interrogative sentences.
Interrogative sentences, or questions, can be of
various kinds: (I) yes/no questions, and (II)
partial questions.
3.3.1. Yes/no questions.
Yes/no questions do not present a distinctive word
order from declarative sentences. They must however
have an interrogative intonation, raising at the
end. Consider the examples in
(31):
(31)
a.
emakumea etorri da?
woman-the arrived is
'has the woman arrived?'
b.
etorri da emakumea?
both interrogatives are possible yes/no questions.
There are two particles that are used in certain
varieties of Euskara in yes/no questions, and they
are illustrated in
(32):
(32)
a.
emakumea etorri dea?
b.
emakumea etorri al da?
In
(32a), the yes/no
interrogative particle a is illustrated, attached to
the auxiliary da 'is'. The combination of da+a
yields the form dea in the example. This
interrogative particle is used in eastern dialects.
In
(32b), we see the
yes/no interrogative particle al, which is used in
central dialects.
3.3.2. Partial questions.
Partial questions contain a question phrase. The
question phrase is the informationally relevant part
of these sentences, and therefore it occupies the
galdegaia position.
Consider the examples in
(33):
(33)
a.
Nor erori da kalean?
Who fallen is street-in
'Who fell in the street?'
b.
Nork ikusi du gizona?
Who-E seen has man-the
'who has seen the man?'
c.
Gizonak nori eman dio liburua?
man-the-E who-D given has book-the
'to whom has the man given the book?'
Considerations made previously regarding word order
and galdegaia apply therefore to these sentences.
Any number of phrases can precede or follow the
phonological phrase containing the galdegaia and the
verb with its inflection, in any order.
In
eastern dialects
and literary western usage, partial questions can be
formed where the main verb follows the question
phrase and auxiliary, as shown in
(34):
(34)
zer
dio gizonak umeari eman?
what has man-the-E child-the-D given
'what has the man given to the child?'
these question parallel the examples provided in
(6) above.
3.4. Causative sentences are formed with the
causative verb arazi (or eragin, in western
varieties of the language), which is attached to the
caused verb, as illustrated in the pair in
(35):
(35)
a.
emakumeak liburua irakurri du
woman-det-E book-det read has
'The woman has read the book
b.
irakasleak emakumeari liburua irakurrarazi dio
teacher-det-E woman-det-D book-det read-cause has
'The teacher has made the woman read the book'
In
example
(35a), a simple
transitive sentence is illustrated. In
(35b), the
causative version of the sentence is provided: the
causative verb arazi has been attached to the verb
irakurri 'to read'. The causer phrase irakaslea 'the
teacher' is marked with ergative case (k). The
causee phrase, emakumea 'the woman', receives dative
case (ri). The example in
(35) involves a
causative sentence
(35b) built on a
transitive sentence
(35a). In these
cases, the causee always receives dative case.
In
the case of causative sentences built on
intransitive sentences, two possibilities arise:
either the causee is marked with absolutive case, or
it is marked with dative case. The later choice is
only possible in western varieties of the language,
with animate and preferably human noun phrases.
Examples are given in
(36):
(36)
a.
umea etorri da
child-det arrived is
'The child has come'
b.
emakumeak umea etorrarazi du
woman-det-E child-det come-made has
'The woman has made the child come'
c.
emakumeak umeari etorrarazi dio
woman-det-E child-det come-made has
'The woman has made the child come'
The
example in
(36a) illustrates a
simple intransitive sentence. In
(36b), a causative
version is provided, where the causee umea 'the
child' receives absolutive case. The example in
(36b) illustrates
the western variety, where the causee, it being
human, receives dative case, umeari 'to the child'.
Note that the agreement pattern of the auxiliary
verb changes accordingly, to reflect the presence of
a dative phrase.
3.5. Impersonal sentences in euskara are constructed
by simply elliminating the
ergative subject
argument of a transitive sentence. The resulting
sentence contains only the
absolutive object
phrase. This is illustrated in the pair in
(37):
(37)
a.
jabeek etxeak saltzen dituzte
owners-detpl-E house-detpl sell-impf them- have-they
'The owners sell houses'
b.
etxeak saltzen dira
house-detpl sell-impf are
'Houses are sold'
As
you can see from the examples, the only difference
between the transitive sentence in
(37a) and the
impersonal sentence in
(37b) is the
absence of the ergative phrase jabeek 'the owners'.
The absence of this phrase in
(37b) carries a
change of
auxiliary verb as
well: whereas in
(37a) the auxiliary
contains
agreement markers
for both the ergative phrase and the absolutive
prhase, and it is therefore a form of ukan 'to
have', the auxiliary in
(37b) contains
onaly an agreement marker for the absolutive phrase
etxeak, and it is therefore a form of izan 'to be'.
1. Noun
phrases: the basics.
A Noun phrase is a
phrase constructed around a Noun. In this sense, we
will say that the Noun 'heads' its phrase. Noun
phrases in Euskara have a very fixed word order, in
contrast to the
sentences, where
phrases can be arranged in many different ways. Let
us consider a few examples:
(1)
a. gure haur
txiki-a
we-gen baby small-the
'our small baby'
b. neska
gazte hau
girl young this
'this young girl'
c. Bilboko
zazpi gizon
Bilbo-from seven man
'seven men from Bilbo'
d. azkarra
den emakume-a
smart-the is-that woman-the
'the woman that is smart'
As we can see in
(1a) and (1b),
adjectives follow the Noun, and
articles and
demonstratives
follow the [Noun + Adj] group (1a,b). Other
modifiers, such as possesive phrases, postpositional
phrases, relative clauses and most quantifiers,
always precede the noun. Thus, for instance, in
(1a), the possesive phrase gure
'our' appears before the Noun; in (1c), the
postpositional phrase Bilboko 'from
Bilbo', and the
quantifier
zazpi, 'seven', both precede the Noun gizon
'man'. Similarly, in (1d), the relative
clause azkarra den 'who is smart'
precedes its head Noun, emakume
'woman'.
We can now consider
a longer example, where more elements are combined:
final position, while complements and other
modifiers precede them. In other words, Euskara is a
'head-final' language. We can say that the Noun
follows its complements and heads the Noun Phrase as
illustrated in
(3):
(3)
[[emakumearen]
argazkiNP]
woman-the-gen photograph
'woman's photograph'
In the same fashion,
since articles and demonstratives follow the Noun,
as shown in examples in
(1) and
(2),
we can say that articles and demonstratives, grouped
under the common name of 'determiners', follow the
Noun Phrase and head the
Determiner Phrase,
as in (4):
(4)
[[[emakumearen]
argazkiNP] aDP]
woman-the-gen photo the
'the photograph of the woman'
However, a few items
appear to break this head-final pattern: The
Adjective follows
the Noun for instance, as shown in previous
examples. There is also a small subset of modifiers
that can either precede or follow the Noun:
(I) modifiers
with the morpheme dun, which
denotes a possesed entity,
(II) modifiers
ending in the morpheme tar,
which denote geographic origin, and
(III) modifiers
without the morpheme tar which
also denote geographic origin.
They are all
illustrated in the examples in
(5):
These modifiers can
either precede or follow the Noun, without any
difference in meaning. It must be noted that example
(5e) can refer to a french book, but also more
specifically to a book to learn French, while (5f)
can only refer to a french book. That is, the string
in (5e) can correspond also to a compund noun.
2. Nouns.
Let us now start
from the bottom of a Noun Phrase: the Noun.
Regarding the types of Noun Phrases they build, we
can distinguish two main kinds of Nouns,
proper Nouns and
common Nouns. They differ in their
relation to
Determiners:
(I)
Noun phrases headed by common Nouns require
Determiners, but
(II)
Noun Phrases headed by proper Nouns don't occur
with determiners.
We will discuss each
of these generalizations now.
2.1. Noun phrases
headed by common Nouns require Determiners.
The few
exceptions to generalization (I) have to do with
syntactic conditions external to the structure of
the Noun Phrase, and they are overviewed in the
section corresponding to Determiners, more
specifically in the discussion on the
determiner a (section
6.1.).
One exception to be
mentioned here, since it is not syntactically
conditioned, is the case of common Nouns that can be
used as proper Names: names of family relations like
iseko 'aunt', can be used as proper Names and
thus display no Determiner:
(7)
a. iseko ikusi
dut
aunt seen have-I
'I have seen auntie'
It is important to
note that Noun Phrases like
(7) are grammatical
only if they refer to the speaker's or the hearer's
aunt or relative.
The family relations
that are subject to this treatment are the
following: ama 'mother',
aita 'father', osaba
'uncle', amama 'grandmother',
aitite 'grandfather'. We use
iseko 'aunt' for the illustration
in the text because its ending is phonologically
dintinct from the determiner -a. Nouns like
errege 'king', or faraoi
'pharaoh', were also used as proper names in older
stages of the language, when referring to one's king
or pharaoh.
2.2.
Noun Phrases headed by proper Nouns cannot appear
with a determiner:
The only exception
to generalization (II) has to do with the nature of
the Noun Phrase itself. If a Noun Phrase is headed
by a proper name which is used to to refer to a
single individual, but to a group of individuals
(i.e. a group of individuals with the name "Alex"),
or it is used to refer to different stages of the
existence of an individual as if the stages were
actually different individuals, then that Noun
Phrase can take Determiners and modifiers that are
otherwise not possible for standard proper Nouns.
From a descriptive point of view, we can say that,
in these cases, the proper Noun is used almost as a
commoun Noun. A few different types of examples are
provided below:
(a)
Demonstratives and
bat 'one', can cooccur with proper
Nouns used as common Nouns, as shown in (9):
Even in these cases,
however, proper Nouns never cooccur with the
determiner a, as shown below in
(10).
In this respect, the behavior of this determiner is
distinct from all other elements we have included in
the category of
Determiners, and it
is also distinct from definite articles in indo-european
languages, where it is common to have the definite
determiner in these cases, as well as the
demonstratives:
(10)
a. gure Alex
our Alex
'our Alex'
b.*gure
Alex-a
our Alex-the
c. Guk
miresten genuen Irune hura
we-E admiring had-we Irune that
'That Irune that we admired'
d.*Guk
miresten genuen Irune-a
we-E adimiring had-we Irune-the
As the examples in
(10)
illustrate, even when they are used to refer to a
group of individuals with the same name, proper
Nouns cannot take the determiner a
on them. Note that if instead of the proper Nouns
Alex and Irune we
put the common Nouns gizon 'man'
and emakume 'woman' in the
examples, then (10a) would be ungrammatical and
(10b, c, d) would be grammatical. For a type of
construction where the determiner a
and proper Nouns appear to coocur, see discussion on
examples
(13), (14) and
(15) below.
(b) Proper Nouns can
occasionally take the
partitive marker,
although this is not a common usage in the language:
(11)
a. ez dut
Irunerik ikusi
not have-I Irune-part seen
'I have not seen (any) Irune'
'I have not see Irune (at all)'
b. Josu
Anderrik ikusi duzu?
Josu Ander-I seen have-you
'Have you seen (any) Josu Ander?'
'Have you seen Josu Ander (at all)?'
c. Bada
Garikoitzik hemen
yes-is Garikoitz-part here
'There are Garikoitz here'
'There is (someone named) Garikoitz here'
As the English
translations try to convey, these sentences can be
used to refer to groups of individuals with the same
name, or to talk about a single individual, in which
case the second translation is more accurate.
(c)
Quantifiers can coocur with proper nouns
used as common Nouns:
Quantifiers
that require the determiner a can
also coocur with proper Nouns. In these cases, the
determiner a seems to appear in the
same constituent as the proper Noun (13):
It is likely that
the Nouns in (13a, b) are complements of the
quantifiers, which would account for the fact that
the quantifiers appear following the Noun rather
than preceeding it (remember the discussion of
examples in (1)
and (2)).
It is significant that also in English, these
constructions appear to take the Noun as complement
of the Quantifier: 'All [(of) the guests]', 'most
[of the guests]'.
The example (13b) is
a superlative construction, where arguably the
quantifier takes the preceding Noun Phrase as a
complement. Interestingly, there is a further
difference between common Nouns and proper Nouns
that surfaces in this construction:
whereas comon nouns
can optionally take the partitive marker, this is
not possible for a proper Noun in this construction.
(d) There are two
other constructions where a proper Noun used as a
common Noun appears to take the determiner a.
They are illustrated in (15):
The example in (15a)
has a posessor following the Noun (a non-canonical
order, since possesors typically precede the Noun,
as shown in example (1a)).
The posessor has the determiner a
attached. It is likely that the determiner in (15a)
is not attached to the Noun Phrase headed by the
proper Noun Peru. Rather, this
construction is probably best analized as containing
an appositional Noun Phrase, which is atributive to
the preceding Noun Phrase that contains the proper
Noun. The structure would then be like (16):
Assuming this to be
the constituent structure of the construction, a
number of its distinctive properties could be
accounted for:
(a) It is impossible
to have the determiner a with a
proper Noun if the possesor appears in its canonical
place, preceding the Noun, as showh in
(10b);
(b) Only the
determiner a can appear following
the atributive. Demonstratives and indefinite
articles are barred from this construction, as shown
in (17):
(17)
a. *Peru gure
hau
Peru our this
'This Peru of ours'
b. *Peru gure
bat
Peru our one
'A Peru of ours'
c. gure Peru
hau our Peru this
'This Peru of ours'
d. gure Peru
bat
our Peru one
'A Peru of ours'
The equivalents of
(15) in English and
Spanish have the structure in (17): 'Mary [the
great]', *'Mary [this great]', 'Pedro [el grande]',
*'Pedro [este grande]', where the definite article
does not correspond to the proper Noun, but rather
to the atributive that follows, and where any
determiner other than the definite article yields
ungrammaticality.
The example in
(15b) constitutes
the best case for a Noun Phrase headed by a proper
Noun bearing a determiner a.
Compare (18a) and (18b), with
(10b) and
(10d):
It is not clear how
examples like
(15b), and (18a,b) could be argued to
have a structure similar to
(15a), where the determiner and the
possesor make a constituent leaving out the proper
Noun. These examples do seems to constitute genuine
cases of proper Nouns heading Noun Phrases that have
the determiner a attached to them.
As shown by the data, the presence of the Adjective
is required to make the construction grammatical.
Summary: proper Nouns
almost never coocur with the definite article a in
Euskara. Only when used as denominators of a set of
elements can proper Nouns coocur with demonstratives
or the indefinite article. Even in this later case,
proper Nouns resist cooccurrence with the determiner
a.
2.3. Gender.
There is no grammatical gender in the nominal
system. The only area of Euskara grammar where
gender morphology can be found is the
familiar treatment
in the verbal morphology. Nouns and adjectives have
no distinct endings depending on gender.
In modern spoken
language, and only in Western dialects, there can be
found some instances were the gender endings of
Spanish have been kept in borrowings and a
distinction is made between masculine and femenine,
but this is a rather modern and marginal phenomenon.
3. Adjectives: Word
order.
As we have already
seen, adjectives always follow the Noun in Euskara(1)
(19):
(19)
a. zaldi zuri
hau
horse white this
'this white horse'
b. *zuri
zaldi hau
There is no
word-order difference between apositive and
atributive adjectives of the sort found in certain
Romance languages; both atributive and apositive
adjectives follow the Noun. More than one adjective
can appear following the noun:
(20)
zaldi zuri txiki
argal hau
horse white small thin this
'this thin small white horse'
3.1. Adjectives and
their complements.
Adjectives appear to have some difficulty taking
syntactic complements in Euskara, that is, they do
not easily take complements with which they make a
separate constituent. For instance, constructions
like 'a woman [proud of her work]' or 'a man [fond
of his paintings]' are not possible:
(21)
*emakume [bere
lanaz harro]a
woman her work-ins proud-the
(A woman proud of her work)
Rather, Euskara
resorts to relative clauses or participial
infinitivals in those cases:
(22)
bere lanaz harro
dagoen emakumea
his work-ins proud is-3A-Comp woman
'A woman who is proud of his work'
Although we are far
from being able to suggest a reason why bare
adjectives in Euskara are unable to have
complements, it is intriguing to relate this fact
with a well known restriction on the distribution of
Adjectival phrases in English. Although the
canonical position of the Adjective in English is
prenominal, Adjectives with complements are banned
from that position:
With respect to the
placement of phrasal heads, Euskara and English are
mirror images: English is head-initial and Euskara
is head-final. Note that adjective placement is also
the mirror image: they are prenominal in English,
and postnominal in Euskara. Since the equivalents of
English Adjectival Phrases appear as prenominal
complements of Euskara (although they never display
the bare Adjective as head), it is possible that at
a deeper level of analysis both phenomena will turn
out to be the same constraint.
3.1.1. Participials.
Participials can function as adjectives in Euskara,
as the examples in (24) illustrate:
In these cases, the
participial behaves exactly like and adjective, that
is, it follows the Noun and precedes the Determiner.
Participials in
adjectival position such as the ones in (24) can
hardly constitute clauses with complements. However,
especially in eastern dialects, construction of the
sort in
(21) are possible
to a certain extent with adjectival participials.
Thus, for instance, examples like the ones in (25)
are acceptable in these dialects, according to
EGLU (1991) and
Euskaltzaindia (1993):
Participial clauses,
that is, clauses headed by a participial form of the
verb, precede the Noun like all other complements,
as shown in (26):
as we can see in the
examples, these participial clauses have the ending
ta and to this ending the mofpheme
ko is attached. Therefore, they
belong tot he class of
ko phrases, which
are discussed immediately below.
4.
Complements of the Noun:
Uner this heading,
we willl group all other phrases that appear in the
Noun Phrase. There are basically two big groups, the
first of which we will name 'ko and
ren phrases', the second one
includes the modifier beste
'other'. The modifiers in both groups must precede
the Noun.
4.1. 'ko' and 'ren'
phrases.The morpheme
ko can indicate location, and this
is why it is sometimes referred to as a 'locative
genitive', but as we will see location is not the
only relation it can convey. However, one general
guideline that is helpful in distinguishing the use
of ko and ren
phrases involves location: ko is
attached to phrases that denote location, or phrases
that denote a property. All other relations a phrase
may bear with respect to a Noun are dealt with by
means of the morpheme ren. Let us
consider a few examples in detail. Consider first
the examples in (27):
In (27a), the
relation between the big house (etxe handi)
and the windows (leihoak) is one of
location: the big house is the place where the
windows are located. That is why the big house is
placed in a ko phrase. In (27b),
the relation between that well-known painter (margolari
ezagun hori) and the portrait (erretratoa)
is not one of location. That is why the well known
painter is placed in a ren phrase.
The relationship expressed by ren
in (27b) can be either: (a) posession, where the
painter owns the portrait in question, regardless of
who painted it, or (b) agency, where the painter is
the author of the portrait, but not necessarily the
owner, or (c) theme, where the painter is the entity
portraid in the portrait, which may have been
painted by someone else, and owned by someone else
as well.
To continue in a
little more detail with ko phrases,
let us add that they can also relate a property with
the head noun. Thus for instance, in (28):
the two examples
illustrate ko phrases that convey
properties which are predicated of the head Nouns,
not locative relations.
Included in the
predicative type of ko phrases are
the examples involving participial clauses, like the
ones illustrated previously in example (26).
Participials can carry one of the two endings
ta or rik that
form resultatives. These resultative phrases can
then take the ending ko and become
modifiers of the Noun, as we further illustrate in
(29):
In (29a), we have
ko phrase containing a resultative
phrase headed by ta, which in turn
contains a participle erosi
'bought', and a locative and a time adverbial
belonging to it. In (29b), we see a ko
phrase containing a resultative phrase headed by the
morpheme rik, with contains a
participle ekarri 'brought' and its
subject argument txoriak 'the bird
(ergative case)', plus a postpositional complement
kabira 'to the nest'.
Ordinal numerals can
be considered a subtype of ren
phrases. They are headed by the morpheme
garren. See more about ordinals in the
section devoted to
numeral quantifiers
.
Ocassionally,
ko and ren phrases
can appear apposited to the right of the Noun
phrase, particularly if it is headed by a proper
name. This type of construction has been considered
in example
(15), within the discussion of proper
Nouns.
4.2. Other: beste.
This word, beste 'other',
'another', does not naturally fall under any of the
categories we have considered so far. Distributional
facts discriminate it from quantifiers, determiners
and other complements of the Noun. Beste
must always precede the Noun, never follow it:
Beste
attaches to a full Noun Phrase, which must conform
to the description provided so far. When the Noun
Phrase is complete, beste can
always appear at the beggining of it:
(31)
a. beste Bilboko
hiru neska alai hauek
other Bilbo-from three girl happy these
'These other happy three girls from Bilbo'
beste
must always precede the numeral quantifier if there
is one. But it seems that it can either precede or
follow the ko and ren
phrases.
(32)
a. amaren beste
Bilboko hiru lagunak
mother-gen other Bilbo-from three friend-detpl
'mother's other three friends from Bilbo'
b. amaren
Bilboko beste hiru lagunak
d. beste
amaren Bilboko hiru lagunak
e. *amaren
Bilboko hiru beste lagunak
The modifier
beste must also be placed following
relative clauses, which, in general, tend to be the
most external modifier of the Noun:
It appears therefore
that beste can be placed in between
ren complements and ko
complements, but always preceding, that is, taking
scope over numeral quantifiers. To see this,
consider now the word order alternations between
ko phrases and quantifiers:
(34)
a. hiru Bilboko
lagun
three Bilbo-from frien
'three friends from Bilbo'
b. Bilboko
hiru lagun
As shown in (34), a
ko phrase can either follow or
precede a numeral quantifier. It has been shown in
(32), that beste can either follow
or precede the ko phrase. However,
if we include the modifier beste in
a Noun phrase like the one in (34), as we have done
in (35), we see that beste, unlike
Bilboko, cannot follow the
quantifier:
(35)
a. Bilboko beste
hiru lagun
Bilbo-from other three friend
'Three other friends from Bilbo'
b. beste
Bilboko hiru neska
c. *hiru
beste Bilboko neska
d. beste hiru
Bilboko neska
When the Noun is
deleted, the resulting paradigm regarding complement
distribution changes slightly. As shown in (36), if
the Noun is deleted, the modifiers and determiner,
if there is one, stay put, and no extra element
needs to be added (unlike the case of English, as
you can judge from the translations):
But if we delete the
Noun in a Noun phrase containing beste
and either a ko phrase or a
ren phrase, then beste
must follow, not precede:
(37)
a. Bilboko
besteak
b. *beste
Bilbokoak
c. Mariren
bestea
d. *beste
Marirena
5.
Quantifiers.
We will divide
quantifiers into three groups, depending on their
ability to cooccur with a determiner:
Regarding their
distribution within the Noun Phrase, numerals in
group (5.1), precede the Noun except for bat
'one', which must follow, and bi
'two', which must follow the Noun only in Western
varieties of Euskara. In group (5.2) there are only
two quantifiers, and both of them must follow the [Noun+Adjective]
group. Finally, in group (5.3), most quantifiers
precede the noun while a few of them must follow the
[Noun+Adjective] group, as the examples below will
illustrate.
5.1. Numerals.
Numeral quantifiers must appear in determinerless
Noun Phrases when they are indefinite (38a), and
with determiners when they are definite (38b, c). In
this latter case, Noun phrases containing numeral
quantifiers can accept either the determiner
a or a demonstrative.
As mentioned above,
numerals precede the Noun. The only exception is the
numeral bat 'one', which must
follow the [Noun+Adj] group in all dialects, and the
numeral bi 'two', which also
follows the Noun in western varieties of Euskara
(39c), but it patterns like all other numerals in
all other dialects (39d):
5.1.1. Ordinal
quantifiers are built
by attaching the suffix garren to
the cardinal (40a,b), except for the case of
'first', which is not *batgarren
but it is independently formed as lehen,
lehenengo or lehendabiziko,
depending on the dialect. Ordinal quantifiers always
precede the Noun, even in the case of ordinals for
'first' and 'second', in all varieties of the
language, as shown in examples (40c,d):
(40)
a. zazpigarren
etxea
seventh house-the
'the seventh house'
b. hirugarren
leihoa
third window-the
'the third window'
c. lehenengo
etxea
first house-the
'the first house'
d. bigarren
leihoa
second window-the
'the second window'
As discussed
previously in example
(29), ordinal
quantifiers can be thought of as a subclass of
ko and ren
phrases. It is therefore not surprising that Noun
phrases containing ordinal quantifiers must have a
determiner. There is no definite/indefinite contrast
like the one in
(38), depending
upon the presence of the determiner. As the examples
in (40) already illustrate, the presence of the
determiner is required, and its absence yields
ungrammaticality.
5.1.2. Distributive
quantifiers are built
by attaching the suffix na to
cardinal quantifiers: thus for instance, from
sei 'six', the distributive
seina 'six each' can be constructed, or
from the cardinal bi 'two', the
distributive bina 'two each'.
Distributive quantifiers are placed wherever the
cardinal they are formed upon is placed. Thus, the
distributive bana 'one each',
formed upon bat 'one', always
follows the Noun, while seina 'six
each', mentioned above, behaves like its cardinal
sei and precedes the Noun:
Noun phrases
containing distributive quantifiers do not take
determiners, as shown by the ungrammaticality of
(42):
(42)
*seina musuak
six-each kiss-thepl
These distributive
quantifiers are rather interesting when compared to
Germanic or Romance languages. In English, for
example, the translations of (41a, b) involve what
is referred to as 'Binomial each' (Safir
& Stowell (1988)), which is dependent not
on the Noun Phrase being distributed but rather on
the Noun Phrase that is the recipient of the
distribution:
(i) [NP2The
women] bought [NP1three books] [NP2each]
(ii) [NP2The
women] [NP2each] bought [NP1three
books]
In Euskara, the
distributive suffix is attached to the quantifier of
the Noun Phrase being distributed, as the examples
in the text show. Moreover, the quantifier the
suffix attaches to belongs in the distributed Noun
Phrase and cannot be placed anywhere else; that is,
it is not of a 'floating' kind. Noun Phrases
containing the ditributive quantifier are
constrained to appear in environments similar to
reciprocal pronouns
like elkar 'each other'. Thus, for
instance, they cannot appear in subject positions:
(43)
*emakume binak
gu ikusi gaituzte
woman two-each-erg we seem us-have-they
('two women each have seen us')
5.1.3. A partial list
of numerals in Euskara.
Here we provide a list of numerals in euskara, as
well as instructions to construct numerals. First,
let us consider the numbers up to twenty:
0 zero
1 bat
2 bi
3 hiru
4 lau
5 bost
6 sei
7 zazpi
8 zortzi
9 bederatzi
10 hamar
11 hamaika
12 hamabi
13 hamairu
14 hamalau
15 hamasei
17 hamazazpi
18 hamazortzi
19 hemeretzi
20 hogei
Twenty is an
important number; it is the base to construct
numerals up to a hundred. Thus, the numbers from
twenty one up to forty are built repeating the list
above after twenty, like this:
and when we reach the
munber thirty, we add twenty and ten:
up to number forty,
which is something like 'again twenty':
40 berrogei
Up to sixty, we keep
on adding the numbers from one to twenty after the
number for forty, like this:
so you already know
that fifty is 'forty and ten':
Now all you need to
know is the numbers for sixty and eighty, which are
translatable as 'three twenties' and 'four
twenties', respectively:
So we are done up to
ninety nine, which is, as you know now,
laurogeita hemeretzi. Some numbers beyond
this one are:
100 ehun 1.000
mila
200 berrehun 2.000 bimila
300 hirurehun 3.000 hirumila
400 laurehun 4.000 laumila...
500 bostehun 1.000.000 milioi bat
600 seiehun 2.000.000 bi milioi/milioi bi
700 zazpiehun 3.000.000 hiru milioi
800 zortziehun
900 bederatziehun
And finally, a few
examples for your practice:
2001 bi mila eta
bat
1984 mila bederatziehun eta laurogeita lau
666 seiehun eta hirurogeita sei
77 hirurogeita hamazazpi
5.2.Quantifiers that
require a determiner.
The quantifiers guzti 'all',
bakoitz 'each', and gehien
'most' require the presence of a determiner, as
shown in (44):
(44)
a. haur guzti-ak
child all-thepl
'All the children'
b. lur guzti-a
earth all-the
'All the earth'
c. haur
bakoitz-a
child each-the
'Each child'
d. *haur
bakoitz-ak
child each-thepl
e. haur(rik)
gehienak
child(prt) most-detpl
'most children'
As shown in (45e),
the Noun preceding the quantifier gehien
'most' can carry the
partitive marker,
which indicates that gehien takes
an entire determiner phrase as its complement,
([[DP] DP]) much in the way of the examples in
(47) with guzti 'all.
There are two main
differences between guzti 'all' and
bakoitz 'each': guzti
'all' can take plural or singular determiners
(44a, b); it can also take demonstratives
as a determiners (45a, b). On the other hand,
bakoitz 'each' does not accept
plural determiners
(44d) or any kind
of demonstratives, (45c,d):
(45)
a.haur
guzti hauek
child all thispl
'All these children'
b.lur
guzti hau
earth all this
'all this earth'
c.*haur
bakoitz hau
child each this
d.*haur
bakoitz hauek
child each thispl
The only way in
which demonstratives can be made to coocur within
the same Noun Phrase as bakoitz
'each' is by resorting to a partitive construction,
as shown in (46):
(46)
a.
hauetariko haur bakoitza
thispl-part-gen child each-the
'each of these children'
In this
construction, the demonstrative hauek
'these' takes the
partitive marker
rik and the ending ko,
becoming a
ko phrase that acts as a complement of
the Noun haur 'child'.
Regarding the
coocurrence of the universal quantifier
guzti 'all' with demonstratives, it must be
noted that
(45a,b) are not the only choices. There
is another usage, which is also current and in fact
prevalent in written records, illustrated in (47):
In these examples,
the quantifier appears apposed after the Noun
phrase. This is why there are two determiners: the
demonstrative heading the first phrase, which takes
the Noun in it, and the determiner a,
in its plural form in (47a) and in its singular form
in (47b), constituting the second phrase, which take
the quantifier in it.
5.3. Determinerless
quantifiers. The
group of quantifiers that never take determiners is
the group of indefinite quantifiers. Most of them
cannot cooccur with any determiner:
The examples in (48)
illustrate the indefinite quantifiers
zenbait 'some' and asko
'many'. While the first one precedes the Noun, the
other one follows it. None of them accept the
presence of a determiner, as shown in (49):
(49)
a. *zenbait
gizon-ak
some man-detpl
b. *zenbait
gizon-a
some man-det
d. *ume
asko-ak
child many-detpl
f. *ume asko-a
child many-det
It must be noted
that, contrary to English, the quantifier
zenbait can only quantify count Nouns, not
mass Nouns, whereas the quantifier asko
can quantify both over count and mass Nouns, that
is, asko can be translated both as
'many' and as 'much', if, for example, it modified a
mass noun such as gari 'wheat' (gari
asko 'much wheat', 'a lot of wheat').
Other quantifiers
that do not allow the presence of a determiner are:
hainbat 'many, much', gutxi
'few, little', edozein,
zeinnahi, whichever, oro
'all', and the interrogatives zenbat,
'how many', 'how much' and zein,
'which'. Examples containing all these quantifiers
are given in (50):
(50)
a. hainbat aburu
many opinion
'many opinions'
b. irudimen
gutxi
imagination little
'little imagination'
c. ikasle
gutxi
students few
'few students'
d. edozein
gona
whichever skirt
e. herrialde
oro
country all
'all countries'
f. zenbat
lagun
how many friend
'how many friends'
g. zein esku
which hand
In these cases, the
presence of the determiner, regardless of number or
syntactic environment, induces ungramaticality. The
only possible exception to this statement is the
quantifier gutxi 'few', which can
take the plural indefinite determiner batzuk
'some, ones', as in the following example:
(51)
ikasle gutxi
batzuk
student few ones
'a few students'
this quantifier can
occasionally take the determiner a
as well, in eastern varieties, but in this case it
is not the equivalent of English 'a/the few...' but
rather, a free variant of the down-entailing
quantifier 'few' illustrated in (50c).
6.
Determiners.
Within the class of
determiners, we will group the demonstratives and
the determiner a. This is the
category that must appear last in the order of
elements in the Noun Phrase. The Determiner takes
the entire Noun Phrase as its complement,
constituting the Determiner Phrase. That is to say,
there is only one determiner corresponding to each
Noun phrase, as the examples in (52) illustrate:
With the exception
of
proper Nouns
discussed above, Noun Phrases in Euskara present a
strong tendency to be headed by an overt Determiner;
that is, there are no instances of 'bare plurals'
and hardly any instances of 'bare nouns'. A second
type of Noun phrase that displays no final
determiner is constituted by those containing
indefinite quantifiers,
which have been discussed in the previous section.
We start in
6.1. with an overview of the usage of the
determiner a, which is perhaps the
most intricate one in this group. Next, in
6.2., we will
discuss demonstratives.
6.1. The determiner
'a'. This determiner
is also called 'article' in many descriptions of
Euskara. As we will see in some detail, it is used
in all environments where a definite article is
required, but its usage goes well beyond the
definite article, since it also heads generic and
indefinite Noun Phrases, as well as some predicative
phrases even when they do not contain Nouns. The
determiner a appears to be the
unmarked determiner, in the sense that it often
surfaces in environments where other languages
display determinerless Noun Phrases.
When the determiner
a is added to a word that ends in
the vowel a, the two vowels fuse
into one: gona 'skirt' gona+a
> gona 'a/the skirt'.
Let us consider the
distribution of this determiner:
6.1.1. Definite Noun
Phrases. The
determiner a is used to convey
definiteness, in Noun phrases containing common
Nouns:
Definite Noun
phrases headed by proper Nouns or pronouns do not
allow the presence of the determiner a.
6.1.2. Indefinite
environments. There
are many other syntactic environments where this
determiner is used despite the fact that the phrase
it heads is not definite. Among those cases we find
the following:
6.1.2.1. Atributes.
Many predicative atributes in Euskara require the
determiner a. Predicates in copular
sentences like the ones in (54), for instance,
require the determiner a:
6.1.2.2. Generic sentences always
require the determiner a, whether
their subjects are singular or plural:
6.1.2.3. Indefinite objects and
subjects, which can often appear determinerless in
many languages, also require the determiner
a:
There are no cases
in Euskara were objects can appear as bare Noun
Phrases, regardless of number. In the realm of
subjects, there is formally no difference between
unaccusative and intransitive predicates
in the sense of
Perlmutter (1978),
in that both require the determiner a.
However, a clear difference can be found when
looking at the interpretation of the Noun Phrases
involved: whereas objects of transitive verbs and
subjects of ergtive predicates ( that is, all
arguments bearing an initial 2 relation, in
Relational Grammar
terms, or being D-Structure complements of the Verb
as in
Burzio's (1986)
work within the Government and Binding framework),
are subject to an existential interpretation, the
subject of the
unergative
predicate cannot receive such existential
interpretation; rather, it must be interpreted as
either definite or universal. Considering the
examples in the text, this means that (56a, b, c)
can be naturally interpreted as 'some corn', 'some
apples' and 'some trucks' repectively, but (57)
cannot be interpreted as 'some men':
(57)
gizonek negar
egin dute
men-det-E cry made have
'the men have cried'
It is only
interpretable as 'all men' or 'the men', which are
truth-functionally equivalent.
6.1.2.4. Existential or
presentational sentences, which involve an
indefinite subject, bear the determiner a:
These existential
sentences can also display partitive case, but the
presence of the determiner a is
also possible, maintaining the indefiniteness of its
Noun phrase.
6.2. Demonstratives.
There are three demonstratives, hau
'this', hori 'that' and
hura 'that (further)'. The demonstratives
indicate varying degrees of proximity in either real
or figurative space or time. Thus, hau
is closer to the speaker, hori is
closer to the entity addressed, and hura
is not close to any of them.
The plural forms of
the demonstratives are:
6.2.1. Emphatic
demonstratives.
Demonstratives have an emphatic form, which is
constructed adding the morpheme xe,
as shown in (59):
(59)
a. hauxe da
irakurri dudan liburua
this-xe is read have-I-that book-det
'this is the book I've
read'
b. horixe
esan dut nik
that-xe said have-I I-E
'that (is what) I have said'
c. zuhaitz
huraxe da aititek landatu zuena
tree that-xe is grandfather-E planted
had-that
'It is that tree that
grandfather planted'
there is a certain
degree of variation among dialects regarding whether
the morpheme xe is added before or
after the case ending or the postposition if there
is one, with the exception of ergative and genitive,
where the morpheme is always inserted after the
demonstrative but before the case ending:
In the case of the
dative case and other postpositions, some varieties
of the language insert the xe
morpheme before the case or postposition, whereas
others insert it after, as the contrast between
(61a) and (61b) illustrates for the dative:
Emphatic
demonstratives are most naturally used when the
phrase headed by the demonstrative is the
galdegaia of the sentence.
6.2.2. Demonstratives
used as pronouns.
There are no distinct forms for third person
pronouns in Euskara, and demonstratives are used as
third person pronominals.
When considering the
use of demonstratives as third person pronouns,
there is a third series of demonstratives that has
special relevance. This series is formed adding the
prefix ber 'same, again' to the
demonstrative: berau,
berori, bera (this third
one is formed not by the combination of ber
and hura, but rather by the
combination of ber and a,
which is a variant of hura, still
in use in western varieties of Euskara). They are
used anaphorically, that is, when the entity they
referred to is already known in the discourse. The
second one in the series, berori,
is still nowadays used as a very polite form of
second person singular, to address authority
figures, such as a priest, or a doctor, among others
(62a). The third one in the series, bera,
is very frequently used as third person pronoun
(62b), alternating with the third demonstrative
hura (62c):
The criteria that
determine when to use bera and when
to use hura are rather complex and
vary from dialect to dialect. We can mention a few
of them, (listed also in
EGLU):
(I) if the
antecendent and the demonstrative are in the
same sentence, bera must be
used, and not hura
(II) if the
antecedent and the demonstrative are not in the
same sentence, eastern varieties prefer
hura whereas western varieties prefer
bera if the antecedent has been
mentioned. This western usage has two
exceptions:
(a) if the
sentence containing bera
contains another Noun phrase that could
count as its antecedent, hura
is preferred even if its antecedent has
beenmentioned previously in another
sentence;
(b) if the
antecedent of the demonstrative belongs to a
group that has been mentioned.
7. Number.
Singular is the
unmarked case, and only plural is marked overtly.
Hence, the best way to think of the category number
is to consider it in terms of a binary category
[+plural] versus [- plural].
7.1. Number and
Determiners. The
specification for number in the Noun Phrase belongs
in the Determiner category and it is morfologically
inseparable from it. Therefore, determinerless Noun
Phrases cannot be marked for number even if they are
semantically plural (63c). Only Noun Phrases that
are headed by an overt determiner can have plural
marking on them (63 b,d).
There is no way of
marking the Noun phrase in (63c) with a plural
morpheme without involving the determiner as in
(63d). Therefore, there are no morphologically
plural determinerless Noun phrases in Euskara.
Plurality can also be encoded in the demonstratives,
since they belong in the class of determiners. Their
plural forms have been illustrated in
6.2., where demonstratives were
overviewed.
7.2. Proximity plural
determiner ok. The
plural determiner ak has the
variant ok, which indicates
proximity in real or imaginary space or time. Thus,
for instance, it is often used as the determiner of
a vocative Noun phrase that refers to the audience
addressed, for its proximity to the speaker:
(64)
goazen, lagun-ok
let's go, friend-detpl
'let us go, my friends'
It is also often
used to refer to a group that includes the speaker:
(65)
gizakiok ez dugu
lurra ondo zaintzen
human-detpl not have-we earht-det
well take-care-of-imp
'we humans do not take good care of the
earth'
But it can be used
generally to refer to any plural entity that is near
the speaker:
(66a) illustrates
and example where the proximity is spatial, since
the plates are near the speaker. The example in
(66b) illustrates the proximity determiner in a
postpositional phrase. The postpositional phrase is
headed by the
locative postposition,
and the determiner looses its final k.
In this second example, the proximity of the days is
of course temporal.
8. Pronouns.
Pronouns are perhaps
best thought of as determiners that do not take Noun
phrases, but we will consider them in a separate
class of their own. It must be noted, however, that
often times the border that separates indefinite
quantifiers, determiners and pronouns is not very
clear, indicating possibly that they all belong in
the same category. In this respect, the curious
reader is encouraged to compare some indefinite
quantifiers considered in
5.3., with what we
will call indefinite pronouns in this section, to
asses their similarities.
8.1. Person pronouns.
The basic paradigm of personal pronouns is the
following:
ni:
first person singular pronoun. It always refers to
the speaker:
(67)
ni joango naiz
I go-irr am
'I will go'
hi:
Second person singular pronoun. It always refers to
the hearer. This pronoun is only used in family or
friendship settings, and it is not used in all
varieties of Euskara. It has the peculiarity of
obligatorily triggering addressee agreement, which
is discussed in
chapter 4.
(68)
hi joango haiz?
you go-irr are
'will you go?'
zu:
Second person singular pronoun. It always refers to
the hearer. It is used in all varieties of the
language, and in varieties where hi
is used, zu is used in all
environments where the former is not appropriate.
(69)
zu joango zara
you go-irr are
'you will go'
gu:
First person plural pronoun. It always refers to a
group that includes the speaker.
(70)
gu joango gara
we go-irr are
'we will go'
zuek:
Second person plural pronoun. It always refers to a
group that includes the hearer.
(71)
zuek joango
zarete
you go-irr are
'you will go'
There are no special
forms for third person pronouns. Euskara makes use
of the demonstrative system to refer to third person
entities. A given form of a demonstrative is also
used as a very polite second person pronoun.
Pronominal uses of demonstratives have been
discussed in
6.2.2.
8.1.1. Emphatic person
pronouns. There is a
second series of emphatic personal pronouns that can
be used alone or following a basic person pronoun.
The emphatic pronouns have different forms depending
on the variety of Euskara:
emphatic of
ni: neu,
nerau, nihaur.
emphatic of hi: heu,
herori, hihaur.
emphatic of zu: zeu,
zerori, zuhaur.
emphatic of gu: geu,
gerok, guhaur.
emphatic of zuek: zeuek,
zerok, zuihauk.
In general, western
varieties of Euskara have a stronger tendency to use
emphatic pronouns than eastern varieties. Emphatic
pronouns can be used in the following circumstances:
(I) they are used
alone when the pronoun is the
galdegaia of the sentence, especially if
it is used contrastively (72)
Emphatic pronouns in
galdegaia function cannot be used
in
negative sentences,
regardless of what galdegaia
position is chosen:
(II) Emphatic
pronouns are also used in other contrastive
environments, typically in topic functions, even if
they are not the galdegaia of the
sentence, as in (74). When immediately following a
normal pronoun they also constitute topics,
equivalents of English 'as for me', as shown in
(74b).
Emphatic pronouns
cannot be used as vocatives:
8.2. Interrogative
pronouns.
Interrogative pronouns are used to construct
partial questions.
Here, we present the basic list of interrogative
pronouns:
These interrogative
pronouns can inflect for
case:
nor
nori nork
who who-dative who-ergative
zer zeri zerk
what what-dative what-ergative
zein zeini zeinek
which which-dative which-ergative
They can also take
postpositions, and
constitute various interrogative postpositional
phrases:
Adverbial
interrogatives in general cannot be directly derived
by combining one of these basic interrogative
pronouns with a postposition. Consider, for
instance, non 'where' and
noiz 'when'. Other adverbial interrogatives
are derived by combining the base non
'where' with the relevant postposition:
non-dik 'where-from', no-ra
'where-to', etc...
8.3.
Indefinite pronouns derived from interrogatives.
There are several paradigms of indefinite pronouns
that are formed taking the interrogative pronoun as
a base.
8.3.1.
Existential indefinites.
They are formed by adding the morpheme bait:
norbait 'someone', zerbait
'something', nonbait 'somewhere'...
in western varieties, these are formed by repeating
the interrogative and inserting the conjunctive
edo 'or': nor edo nor
'someone', zer edo zer 'something',
non edo non 'somewhere'.
8.3.2.
Universal, free-choice indefinites.
There are two ways to construct them:
(a) in western
varieties, they are derived by prefixing
edo to the interrogative:
edonor 'whoever', edozer,
'whatever', edozein,
'whichever', edonon 'wherever'
etc...
(b) in eastern
varieties, they are derived by suffixing
nahi to the interrogative pronoun:
nornahi 'whoever',
zernahi 'whatever', zeinhai
'whichever', nonahi 'wherever'
etc...
These quantifiers
most often take the semantic value that 'free choice
any' has in English. Consider a few
examples:
(76)
a. edonork egin
dezake hori
anyone do it-can that
'anyone can do that'
b. edozer
eros daiteke diru horrekin
anything buy can-be money that-with
'anything can be bought with that money'
c. edonon
aurkitzen dira bedar hauek
anywhere find-hab are grass these
'these grass can be found anywhere'
8.3.3. Negative
Polarity Items. They
are formed by prefixing e or
i to the
interrogative pronoun:
and they can be
declined for
case, or take
postpositions in
the same fashion that simple interrogatives do.
Negative Polarity Items can only appear under the
scope of downward entailing operators such as
negation (77a) (Ladusaw
(1979)), quantifiers such as
gutxi 'few' (77b), conditionals (77c), and
yes/no questions (77d), for instance:
(77)
a. ez da inor
etorri
not is anybody arrived
'Noone arrived'
b. ikasle
gutxik ikasi dute ezer
student few-E learned have anything
'Few students have learned anything'
c. inon
aurkitzen baduzu, harrituko naiz
anywhere find-hab if-have-you, surprise-irr
am
'if you find it anywhere, I will be
surprised'
d. inork
ekarriko al du?
anyone-E bring-irr int has
'Will anyone bring it?'
Environments that
are not downward entailing do not permit the
presence of these pronouns, as the ungrammaticality
of (78a, b) shows:
These Negative
Polarity Items can appear in environments that are
not downward entailing, and receive a 'free-choice'
interpretation, similar to the pronouns overviewed
in
8.3.2. Examples are
given in (79):
The example in (79a)
refers to an opinion that anyone can hold, and the
example in (79b) is a sardonic exclamation, only
applicable to someone who is absolutely not the
king's daughter.
Occasionally, and
particularly in ready-made sentences and aphorisms,
these polar pronouns can also take on meanings such
as 'someone else'. We provide an example in (80):
(80)
inork beti errua
anyone-E always blame-det
'someone else always (bears) the blame'
8.3.4. Plural
Interrogatives. In
western varieties mostly, interrogative pronouns can
take the plural morpheme tzu to
indicate plurality. The reader is invited to read
again the considerations made regarding the
relationship between
number and the
determiner class. Given what was said there, the
presence of a plural morpheme that can be attached
to interrogatives strengthens the hypothesis that
determiners and pronouns
in general constitute a natural class in Euskara.
The forms created by
the addition of the plural marker are:
nor
'who' nortzu 'who (plural)'
zer 'what' zertzu
'what (plural)'
zein 'which' zeintzu
'which (plural)'
8.4. Anaphors and
reciprocals. Strictly
speaking, there are no anaphoric pronouns in
Euskara. Anaphors pronouns in Euskara, like in many
other languages of the world, make reference to a
body part. In the case of Euskara, the body part is
the head. Hence, 'my own head' is the translation of
the Noun phrase corresponding to English 'myself'.
The anaphor is thus a determiner phrase headed by
the determiner a. The determiner
phrase contains a Noun phrase, headed by the Noun
buru 'head'. This Noun phrase
contains a genitive phrase which contains the
relevant personal pronoun. This 'russian doll'
structure is illustrated in (81):
The paradigm of
anaphors is:
neure burua
myself
heure burua yourself
bere burua her/himself
geure burua(k) ourselves
zeuen burua(k) yourselves
bere burua(k) themselves
In the plural
persons, the determiner can either be singular or
plural; the parenthesis indicates this option. Third
person anaphors are made by using the anaphoric
pronominal bere, overviewed in
6.2.2.
The reciprocal
pronoun in Euskara is elkar 'each
other'. There is a variant of this reciprocal:
bata bestea, literally 'the one the
other', which is also used as a reciprocal. Although
ther antecedent must be plural, elkar
and bata bestea themselves are not
plural, and therefore they do not trigger plural
agreement on the verb:
Anaphor phrases and
reciprocals can be inflected for
case, and they can
also take
postpositions to
form postpositional phrases:
Anaphors and
reciprocals must have their antecedent in the same
sentence:
The antecedent of
the anaphor need not precede it linearly, as the
comparison between the examples in (82) and (83)
illustrate:
It is generally
accepted that the antecedent must be higher in the
basic syntactic structure than the anaphor or the
reciprocal. Thus, for instance, anaphors and
reciprocals do not usually appear as subjects,
presumably because there is no antecedent high
enough to command them:
However, this issue
might turn out to be a little more complex. The
examples in (85) appear rather acceptable, despite
the fact that the anaphoric expression is marked
with ergative case, the subject case, which there
are good reasons to believe is the highest in the
basic syntactic structure:
Whatever turns out
to be the explanation for examples like the ones in
(85), it is generally true however, that most
predicates do not allow subject anaphors:
(86)
*neure buruak
ikusi nau ni
my-own head-E seen me-has-it I
(*myself has seen me)
1. There is
only one exception to this rule, which involves the
noun jente 'people', in combination
with the adjective gazte 'young' :
It is used in some varieties of the language to
refer to 'the youth'.
1. Grammatical cases: the
basics.
1.1. Absolutive case.
1.2. Ergative case.
1.3. Dative case.
2. Partitive.
2.1. Partitive as a polar
determiner.
2.2. Partitive and absolutive.
3. Postpositions.
3.1. Declension versus
agglutination.
3.2. Changes induced by
morpheme merger.
3.3. Locational postpositions.
3.3.1. Animacy: the morpheme
ga.
3.3.2. Singular determiners
versus others: the morpheme ta.
3.4. Other postpositions.
1. Grammatical cases: the basics.
There are three grammatical cases in Euskara:
Ergative, Dative and Absolutive. They are marked on
the
Noun phrases by the
following endings or morphemes: k for the ergative,
i for the dative and zero for the absolutive.
Example (1) inflects the Noun phrase hamaika pauso
'eleven steps' for each case:
(1)
a. hamaika pausok
eleven step-E
'eleven steps (ergative'
b. hamaika pausori
eleven step-D
'eleven steps (dative)'
c. hamaika pauso
eleven step-A
'eleven steps (absolutive)'
The example chosen being a
determinerless Noun phrase,
all that is added is the case ending itself. Notice
that one case morpheme attached at the end suffices
to mark the entire Noun phrase; that is, we do not
have to attach an ergative marker to each of the
words of the Noun phrase in
(1a), nor do we have to add more than one
dative marker in
(1b). Adding the case ending at the end
of the last word, whichever this might be, is enough
to mark the entire phrase.
(1a) illustrates a
Noun phrase inflected for ergative case (this is
another way to say that the Noun phrase has the case
marker corresponding to the ergative). The case
morpheme k is glued to the last word and the Noun
phrase now bears ergative case. We will see later
what ergative case is, in
section 1.2.
In
(1b), things are a little more complex:
if we take the Noun phrase hamaika pauso and add the
dative case morpheme i, we should obtain *hamaika
pausoi (the asterisk is there to remind us that this
is not the form the grammar eventually creates).
There is an extra r that does not belong to the Noun
phrase or to the case ending. This extra r is called
an epenthesis, and the reason why it is there, is
that (the phonotactics of) Euskara will not accept
the combination o+i at morpheme boundaries. To avoid
it, an r is inserted. Euskara accepts the
combination ori because it has a consonant
separating those two vowels. Languages differ as to
what combinations they like or dislike, and
therefore they insert epenthetic sounds in different
places, for different reasons. We will encounter
other instances of epenthetic insertions throughout
this chapter.
Finally,
(1c) illustrates the Noun phrase
inflected for absolutive case. This one is
absolutelly the easiest, because the way to inflect
it is to do nothing, or at least nothing visible.
Another way to say 'nothing' is to say that there is
a 'zero morpheme' (linguists will actually say that
a 'zero morpheme' is not the same as 'nothing', and
they have good reasons for it, but at this level of
discussion, let's at least conclude that another way
of saying 'nothing visible' is 'zero morpheme').
Now pay attention to the glosses (those would be the
funny sentences that look like English but are not
quite English right underneath the examples in
Euskara). You see that the gloss for the ergative
ending is 'E', and the gloss for the dative case
ending is 'D'. The gloss for the invisible morpheme
in the absolutive case is 'A'. From now on, ergative
and dative cases will be glossed as E and D
respectively. As for the gloss of the absolutive, it
will oscillate between A and no gloss at all.
Linguists are not yet in agreement as to whether the
ending of the absolutive is something invisible or
nothing at all. Glossing the silent ending as A
leans towards the first option, since we name in the
gloss something that we don't perceive but which is
nevertheless there. Not providing a gloss indicates
there is nothing to gloss at all. This description
would like to remain noncommital regarding this
issue, hence the hesitation in the gloss. Mostly,
Noun phrases marked with absolutive case will
receive no gloss for case, but when discussing
verbal morphology in
chapter 4, the
gloss A will be used to mark
agreement with absolutive,
which is mostly visible.
1.1. Absolutive case. Let us start with the case
that seems easiest; the absolutive, also called the
null case, or the unmarked case. A Noun phrase bears
absolutive case under two conditions:
(I) if it is the subject of a verb that only takes
one argument, that is, if it is the subject of an
intransitive verb, as shown in
(2a) and
(II) if it is the object of a verb that takes at
least two arguments, that is, if it is the object of
a transitive verb, as shown in
(2b).
(2)
a. otsoa etorri da
wolf-det arrived is
'The wolf has arrived'
b. ehiztariak otsoa harrapatu du
hunter-det-E wolf-det caught has
'the hunter has caught a/the wolf'
Vocatives also take absolutive case, or at least
they do not take any other visible case ending:
(3)
a. Nekane, alde hemendik!
Nekane, out here-from
'Nekane, get out of here!'
b. Eskerrik asko, alkate andrea!
thanks many mayor lady-det!
'Thank you, (lady) major!'
Some descriptions of Euskara extend the distribution
of absolutive case to many other domains, such as
predicate phrases and measure phrases. This grammar
will not include those domains, since there appears
to be little evidence that those phrases do actually
bear absolutive, aside from the fact that they have
no visible case ending. It is possible that they are
simply caseless, as it is common in other languages.
1.2. Ergative case. The morpheme for ergative case
is, as we have seen, k. If the word it attaches to
ends in a consonant, then an
epenthetic vowel e
is inserted, as illustrated in (4):
(4)
a. zazpi gizon+k
seven man-E
b. zazpi gizonek
seven man-E
'seven man (ergative)'
(4a) presents the Noun phrase and the case marker,
which yield an output that is not acceptable in
Euskara. (4b) presents the same Noun phrase and the
case marker, where the epenthetic vowel e has been
inserted. This is the output Euskara creates in this
case.
Noun phrases are inflected for ergative case if they
are subjects of
transitive verbs:
(5)
a. zazpi gizonek ekarri dute pianoa
seven man-E brought have piano-det
'seven men have brought the piano'
b. etxeko txakurrak ikusi gaitu
house-of dog-det-E seen us-has
'the dog of the house has seen us'
c. Mirenen anaiek ez dakite kanta hau
Miren-gen brother-detpl-E not know song this
'Miren's brothers don't know this song'
(5a) illustrates our previous example Noun phrase as
the subject of the transitive verb ekarri 'to
bring'. (5b) illustrates a singular definite Noun
phrase marked with ergative case, since it is the
subject of the verb ikusi 'to see'. Finally, (5c)
illustrates a plural definite Noun phrase inflected
for ergative. Note that when the ergative marker k
attaches to the plural determiner ak, the resulting
form is ek. Again, this Noun phrase is the subject
of a transitive verb, in this case, jakin 'to know'.
Along these lines, it must also be noted that the
combination of the proximity determiner ok and
ergative k yields ok. Thus, regarding Noun phrases
ending in the proximity dterminer ok, the absolutive
and the nominative forms are identical; this is
called 'syncretism'.
There is a small set of verbs that require ergative
subjects, despite the fact that they do not appear
to be transitives. Some of these verbs are: iraun
'to remain' (6a), irakin 'to boil' (6b), and ihardun
'to be engaged' (6c).
(6)
a. gure etxeak zutik irauten du
our house-det-E standing remain-hab has
'our house remains standing'
b. urak irakin du
water-det-E boiled has
'the water has boiled'
c. langileak lanean dihardu
worker-det-E work-in engages
'the worker is (engaged in) work(ing)'
1.3. Dative case. The morpheme for the dative case
is i. If it attaches to a base ending in a vowel, an
epenthetic r is
inserted. Consider the following examples:
(7)
a. zazpi gizoni eman diet lana
seven man-D given have-them-I work-det
'I have given work to seven men'
b. etxeko txakurrari hezur bat eman diozu
house-of dog-det-D bone one given have-it-you
'You have given a bone to the dog of the house'
c. Mirenen anaiei oparia ekarri diezu
Miren-gen brother-detpl present-det brought have-
them-you
'You have brought a present to Miren's brothers'
As it is to be expected, in example
(7a) the word gizon
'man' and the dative morpheme i get together
directly. In
(7b), the epenthetic r is inserted
between the determiner a that is attached to the
Noun txakur 'dog' and the dative morpheme i,
resulting in txakurr+a+r+ i. The double rr at the
end of txakur does not reflect a morphological
process, nothing has been added in the morphology.
In
(7c), the dative morpheme has been
attached to the plural determiner ak. The components
are anaia+ak+i. Note that given the pieces to put
together, there is no reason to insert the
epenthetic r. Phonological processes that we will
not consider here turn the underlying form anaiaaki
into anaiei.
The dative case is given to Noun phrases with
various different jobs in the sentence; in this
sense, it is harder to give a characterization of
conditions for dative assignment without running
into a longish list. This is a clear indication that
it is the least well understood case in the system.
Dative case is given to the second object, or the
indirect object in a verb that has three arguments.
For instance, if we consider the examples in
(7), we can see that the verbs in the
sentences are: eman 'to give', which normally takes
the subject giver, the object given, and the
indirect object which is the recipient of the
object; the other verb is ekarri to bring, where,
besides who brings what, we can talk about who it
was brought for.
Some verbs that have only two arguments require that
one of them be marked with dative case. Some of
these verbs are ekin 'to start on, to engage on'
(8a), eutsi 'to hold' (8b), begiratu 'to look at'
(8c):
(8)
a. lanari ekin behar diogu
work-det-D engage must have-it-we
'we must engage in work'
b. Mikelek zezenari adarretatik eutsi dio
Mikel-E bull-det-D horn-detpl-from held has-it-him
'Mikel held the bull from the horns'
c. sugeak txoriari begiratu dio
snake-det-E bird-det-D look-at has-it-it
'the snake has looked at the bird'
2. Partitive case.
A Noun phrase can be marked with partitive if it
meets the conditions for
absolutive case.
However, not all Noun phrases that meet the
conditions for absolutive case can be marked with
partitive. For a Noun phrase to be marked with
partitive case, further conditions must be met that
go beyond grammatical function, and that are
irrelevant to absolutive case in general.
In fact, as we will see throughout this discussion,
it is not clear whether the partitive morpheme
should be treated as a case morpheme or as a
determiner. In this
description, we include partitive among the
grammatical cases, following the stardard practice
in descriptions of Euskara, but various pieces of
evidence will be presented that suggest that this
might not be the best way to classify it. Rather,
what is called partitive case in Euskara might turn
out to be best thought of as an indefinite,
polar determiner, akin to the English
polar determiner any.
2.1. Partitive as a polar determiner. Let us start
our discussion with a few examples of partitive
case. In particular, we will consider the example
sentence in (9) in contrast to the example sentences
in
(7).
(9)
a. zazpi gizoni ez diet lanik eman
seven man-D not have-them-I work-prt given
'I have not given any work to seven men'
b. etxeko txakurrari hezurrik eman diozu?
house-of dog-det-D bone-prt given have-it-you
'Have you given any bone to the dog of the house?'
c. Mirenen anaiei oparirik ekarri badiezu
Miren-gen brother-detpl present-prt brought if-have-
them-you
'If you have brought any present to Miren's
brothers'
There are two differences between the examples in
(9) and the examples in
(7):
(I) the first difference is that whereas the
sentences in (9) are all declarative, the sentences
in
(7) are negative
(7a), interrogative
(7b) and
conditional
(7c). What these three have in common is
that they are all
downward entailing
environments.
(II) The second difference is that the objects of
the three sentences in (9) do not have the same
endings as the sentences in (7): whereas in
(7a) and
(7c) the object
bears the determiner a, and in
(7b) the object has the numeral bat
'one', in (9) they all have the partitive ending ik
(with the
epenthetic consonant
r inserted in
(7c)). Correlating
with this difference in morphology, the meaning of
the object has changed too, as the translations
reflect.
The two differences are in fact correlated.
Partitive in Euskara is licensed in downward
entailing environments, the same environments where
Negative Polarity Items are licensed (see
8.3.3. in chapter 2).
Declarative sentences do not allow the presence of
the partitive:
(10)
a. *txakurrari hezurrik eman diot
dog-det-D bone-prt given have-it-I
b. *dirurik eskatu dut kalean
money-prt asked have-I street-in
There is one environment where the partitive can
appear that is not downward entailing, however.
Partitive marking on a Noun phrase is possible in
existential sentences:
(11)
a. bada ogirik etxe honetan
yes-is bread-prt house this-in
'there is bread in this house'
b. bada zorionik munduan
yes-is happiness-prt world-in
'there is hapiness in the world
This is one environment where the distribution of
partitive does not coincide with the distribution of
Negative Polarity Items:
(12)
*bada inor etxe honetan
yes-is anyone house this-in
The partitive marker ik is incompatible with any
other determiner, which suggest that this marker is
in complementary distribution with the elements in
the determiner class. Moreover, unlike the
grammatical cases,
the partitive marker carries a semantic value with
it, one of polar indefiniteness. That is, not all
indefinitess can be marked with partitive. Only
indefinitess in downward entailing environments and
existential predicates can carry the partitive
morpheme.
Partitive Noun phrases are also possible, although
never obligatory, in some quantificational
environments, as illustrated in (13) (see section
5.2. in chapter 2):
(13)
liburu(rik) gehien irakurri duena Ane da
book-(prt) most read has-her-that Ane is
'the one who has read most books is Ane'
2.2. Partitive and absolutive. As it has been
mentioned in the introductory paragraph to this
section, Noun phrases carrying the partitive marker
must meet the conditions for absolutive case
assignment. That is, they have to be either objects
of transitive verbs, or subjects of intransitive
verbs. Consider (14), which consists of the negative
versions of the examples in
(2):
(14)
a. otsorik ez da etorri
wolf-prt not is arrived
'no wolf has arrived'
(literally: 'isn't any wolf arrived')
b. ehiztariak ez du otsorik harrapatu
hunter-det-E not has wolf-prt caught
'the hunter hasn't caught any wolf'
c. *ehiztaririk ez du otsorik/otsoa harrapatu
hunter-prt not has wolf-prt/wolf-det caught
Both (14a) and (14b) are grammatical sentences,
where the subject of the intransitive verb etorri
'arrive' and the object of the transitive verb
harrapatu 'to catch' respectively carry the
partitive morpheme ik. However, (14c) is not
grammatical, the reason being that the partitive
marker is attached to the subject of the transitive
verb, whose case is ergative. Partitive is not
available for dative Noun phrases either, as shown
in (15):
(15)
*ez diot etxeko txakurrarik(i) hezurra/ik eman
not have-I house-of dog-prt-(D) bone-det/prt given
(15) illustrates the impossibility of adding the
partitive morpheme to a Noun phrase inflected for
dative case. The sentence is ungrammatical in all
the choice provided by the parentheses: whether we
actually add the dative case morpheme on top of the
partitive, or whether the direct object carries the
a determiner or the partitive.
The behaviour of the partitive just illustrated in
the discussion can be interpreted in two different
ways:
(I) either the partitive itself is a subvariety of
absolutive case, and this would account why it
cannot be placed where other cases are required, or
(II) the partitive is not a variety of a case, but a
type of determiner, which is incompatible with any
overt case ending, and it can only appear in
environments of absolutive case because this is the
only case with no ending.
3. Postpositions.
Euskara has a strong tendency to place the heads of
phrases at the end of the phrase; this property has
already been considered in the first and second
chapters of this grammar, when talking about
the sentence and
the
Noun phrase. It is
not surprising, therefore, that instead of having
pre-positions at the beggining of prepositional
phrases, it chooses to have post-positions, that
appear at the end of postpositional phrases.
Prepositions and postpositions are in this sense one
and the same grammatical category, and Euskara being
a head-final language, places them at the end of the
postpositional phrase. Note, by the way, that
case morphemes are
no exception to this generalization, and they have
been argued by some linguists to head case phrases
as well.
3.1. Declension versus agglutination. Many
descriptions of Euskara state that Euskara has
nominal declensions, and they provide paradigms for
them. We will not follow this practice here, since
it is by now agreed that the concept of declension
is rather misleading in order to describe the
language. Euskara works more like a child's
construction game: phrases are constructuted by
attaching elements, typically at the end of the
previous phrase. This way of constructing phrases by
attaching morphemes is known as agglutination.
Euskara is therefore and agglutinative language. We
have seen in
chapter 2 that
agglutination is the strategy for constructing Noun
phrases. The same strategy is used to mark these
Noun phrases with a grammatical case, as shown
above, and this strategy is maintained when building
postpositional phrases. Let us consider a couple of
examples:
(16)
a. [Bilboko kale bat]-ean
[Bilbo-of street one]-in
'in one street of Bilbo'
b. [zazpi leiho]tatik
[seven window]from
'from seven windows'
In (16a), the locative postposition has been
attached to the last word of the Noun phrase in
bracktes, the numeral bat 'one', but it is the
entire Noun phrase that the postposition takes as
its complements, as the bracketed structure
indicates. Similarly, in (16b), the postposition is
physycally attached to the last word of its
complement Noun phrase, in this case the Noun leiho
'window'.
3.2. Changes induced by morpheme merger. In some
cases, the merger of the last word of the Noun
phrase and the postposition suffers phonological
processes that result in an output that is different
from the mere conjunction of the two words. we have
already seen examples of this in our discussion of
examples
(1b) and
(7c), involving
dative case.
Concerning postpositions, the processes that alter
slightly the final output of the form involve mostly
the merger with the
determiner. As we
consider paticular postpositions, we will point out
the idiosyncrasies that merger processes may yield
in each case. There are three cases that apply to
all merger processes and postpositions:
(I) The
plural determiner
ak becomes e when a postposition follows it. Thus,
for instance, the plural lagunak and the
instrumental postposition z yield the form lagunez,
where the change is ak > e.
(II) When a merger involves a vowel-ending word and
a vowel-initial postposition, te
epenthetic consonant
r is inserted. Recall the discussion of
(1b) and
(7c)
(III) When a merger involves a consonant-ending word
and a consonant-initial postposition, the epenthetic
vowel e is inserted. Thus, for instance, the
combination of the Noun mutur 'snout, mouth' and the
instrumental postposition z yields the form muturrez
'with the mouth (downward)'. It must be kept in ind
that the dipthong au counts as a consonant in this
respect: gau 'night' also becomes gauez after the
addition of the instrumental postposition.
3.3. Locational postpositions. They involve
postpositions whose function is to place their
complement in some relation with space or time. The
locational postpositions are six:
1. locative n 'in/on'
2. directional ra 'to'
3. directional towards rantz 'towards'
4. directional (endpoint) raino 'up to'
5. origin tik 'from'
6. genitive locative ko 'of'
Locational postpositions have two particularities
that do not extend to other postpositions we will
consider later. On the one hand, they treat
differently animate Nouns and inanimate Nouns. On
the other hand, they treat inanimate phrases headed
by singular determiners differently from all others.
In both cases, the distinction involves the addition
of a morpheme:
ga in the case of
animates,
ta in the case of
inanimate phrases lacking a singular determiner.
Regarding the sixth postposition, ko, see also
section
4.1. in chapter 2.
This is the only locational postposition that does
not accept animate complements, therefore the
considerations in
3.3.1. do not apply
to it.
3.3.1. Animacy: the morpheme ga. Locational
postpositions differentiate between phrases headed
by animate Nouns, and phrases headed by inanimate
Nouns. When a locational postposition takes an
animate Noun phrase as its complement, the morpheme
ga is placed between the Noun phrase and the
postposition, as shown in (17):
(17)
[[[gure ama]ren]ga]n
[[[our mother]gen]ga]in
'in/on our mother'
The example in (17) provides a bracketed
representation, hoping to make the discussion easier
to follow. Surrounded by the innermost brackets, we
have the Noun phrase gure ama 'our mother'. In order
to put it together with the locative postposition n,
the noun phrase takes the genitive ending ren, and
then the morpheme ga, after which the postposition
is finally attached. The presence of the genitive
morpheme is optional in singular Noun phrases, as
illustrated in (18):
(18)
a. adiskide leial-a-ren-ga-n
friend loyal-det-gen-ga-in
'in/on the/a loyal friend'
b. adiskide leial-a-ga-n
friend loyal-det-ga-in
'in/on the/a loyal friend'
c. adiskide leial-en-ga-n
friend loyal-detpl+gen-ga-in
'in/on (the) loyal friends'
As the examples show, in the case of the singular
Noun phrase the genitive morpheme can either surface
or not (18a, b), but in the case of a plural Noun
phrase, the genitive marker is necessary (18c). In
example (18c), the plural determiner ak and the
genitive marker en merge into en, as the gloss
indicates. As discussed in the section on
number, plurality
is enconded in the determiner. Therefore, the
difference betwen a singular and a plural Noun
phrase for the purposes of morphology depends on
whether the determiner is singular or plural.
What counts as a animate Noun in the grammar of
Euskara is not determined by modern biology. Most
cases ar rather straightforward, but in trying to
draw a border between animates and inanimates,
curious pairs are often encountered, some of which
we will mention here. Abstract entities can be
treated as animate or inanimate (19a, b), and the
reciprocal elkar is always treated as an animate,
regardless of whether it refers to an inanimate
entity (19c).
(19)
a. zure ideiengan ez daukat nik konfiantza handirik
your idea-detpl-in not have-I I-E confidence big-prt
'I don't have much confidence in your ideas'
b. bere burutazioetan murgildurik dago
her/his thoughts-detpl-in immersed is
's/he is immersed in her/his thoughts'
c. etxe hauek elkarrengandik hurbilegi daude
house these each-other-gen-ga-from near-too are
'these houses are too near each other'
Example (19a) treats the abstract Noun ideia 'idea'
as animate, while in (19b), the abstract noun
burutazio '(sudden) thought' is treated as
inanimate.
There are other cases where an animate entity is
treated as an inanimate. There are hardly any
instances of the reverse process, however, which
would indicate that the specification for animacy
treats the animate as the marked value, and the
inanimate as the unmarked or default value.
(20)
a. alabengan aitarenganako joera nabari ohi da
daughter-genpl-in father-gen-towards tendency-det
notice usually is
'in daughters, a tendency towards the father is
usually noticeable'
b. alabetan bihurriena, neure Matxalen duzu
daughter-inpl naughtiest, my Matxalen have-you
'of all daughters, the naughtiest is my Matxalen'
(literally: 'in daughters, the naughtiest you have
my Matxalen')
In (20a), the Noun phrase headed by the animate noun
alaba 'daughter' is treated as animate in the
grammar, that is, the morpheme ga is inserted
between the genitive morpheme attached to the Noun
phrase and the locative postposition. In (20b),
however, the same Noun is treated as inanimate, and
no ga morpheme surfaces. As for the ta marker that
appears in (20b), we consider it in the next
section.
The presence of the ga marker induces certain
changes in some locational postpositions, which we
indicate in the paradigm below, made on the basis of
the initial paradigm provided in
section 3.3. above:
2. directional ga+ra > gana 'to'
3. directional towards ga+rantz > ganantz 'towards'
4. directional (endpoint) ga+raino > ganaino 'up to'
5. origin ga+tik > gandik 'from'
3.3.2. Singular determiners versus others: the
morpheme ta. There is a second distinctive property
of locational postpositions. Among inanimate
phrases, they distinguish those that have a singular
determiner from those that do not. Noun phrases that
do not have a singular determiner must carry the
morpheme ta before the postposition. Let us see this
by means of an example. We will compare an inanimate
phrase with a singular determiner (21a), with
another one that does not have a singular determiner
(21b):
(21)
a. [adiskidearen argazkia]n
[friend-det-gen photo-det]in
'in the friend's photo'
b. [hiru argazki]ta-n
[three photo]ta-in
'in three photos'
You recall from
chapter 2, section 5.,
that indefinite Noun phrases containing a numeral do
not carry a determiner. Hence, the basic contrast
between the Noun phrases in (21a) and (21b) is that
the former ends in the singular determiner a,
whereas the later does not. As you can see, the
locative marker n, attaches straightforwardly(1)
in (21a), but in (21b), it requires the presence of
the marker ta.
Other cases where no singular determiner ends the
Noun phrase are constituted by plural Noun phrases,
which are ended in the
plural determiners ak or ok,
or in the plural versions of demonstratives. They
also carry the marker ta:
(22)
a. adiskidearen argazki-e-ta-n
friend-det-gen photo-detpl-ta-in
'in the friend's photos'
b. Pirinioko mendi-o-ta-n
Pyrenees-of mountain-detpl-ta-in
'In the(se) mountains of the Pyrenees'
c. liburu zahar haue-ta-n
book old these-ta-in
'in these old books'
As you can see in (22a), the plural determiner ak
becomes e after the merger with the morpheme ta.
However, the proximity determiner ok and the plural
demonstrative hauek 'these', only loose their final
k.
3.4. Other postpositions. In what follows, we will
list the remaining postpositions, providing examples
and stating, when necessary, what changes may happen
the merger of the postposition and the Noun phrase.
1. Comitative ekin 'with': When added to a word
ending in a vowel, the
epenthetic consonant r must be inserted
(23a, b). When added to the
plural determiner ak,
the result is ekin (23d):
(23)
a. Gasteizko lagunarekin
Gasteiz-from friend-det-with
'with the friend from Gasteiz'
b. zazpi zapirekin
seven handkerchief-with
'with seven handkerchiefs'
c. zenbait gizonekin
some men-with
'with some men'
d. Gasteizko lagunekin
Gasteiz friend-detpl-with
'with the friends form Gasteiz'
2. Instrumental z 'with', 'by': when it is added to
a word ending in a consonant, the
epenthetic vowel e
is inserted (24b):
(24)
a. zure giltzaz
your key-det-ins
'with your key'
b. hamaika oharrez jositako liburua
eleven note-ins sewed book-det
'a book full of notes'
(literally: 'a book sewed with eleven notes')
c. Bizkaiko mendiez mintzatu gara
Biscay-from mountain-detpl-ins spoken are-we
'we have spoken of the mountains of Biscay'
3. Cause, motive gatik 'because', 'for': the
genitive en is inserted between the postposition and
its complement. The genitive is optional in phrases
containing a singular determiner (25a), not so
frequently in phrases containing a plural
determiner.
(25)
a. argia(ren)gatik gustatzen zait Menorca
light-det-(gen-)because like is-to me Menorca
'I like Menorca because of the light'
b. arrazoi birengatik ukatu didate dirulaguntza
reason two-gen-because denied have-me-they grant-det
'they have denied the grant to me because of two
reasons'
c. gure adiskideengatik egingo dugu
our frien-detpl-gen-because do-irr have-we
'we will do it for our friends'
4. Goal entzat 'for': the usual
epenthetic processes
apply when necessary.
(26)
a. Amaiarentzat erosi dut oparia
Amaia-for bought have-I present-det
'I have bought the present for Amaia'
b. bost mutilentzat dira mozorro horiek
five boy-for are costume those
'those costumes are for five boys'
c. gure familiako umeentzat egingo dugu jaia
our family-from child-detpl-for do-irr have-we
party-det
'we will have a party for the children in our
family'
1. It is far from clear that the singular inanimate
phrases that take the locative marker are built up
by merging the determiner a and the locative ending
n, but the reasons that bring us to this conclusion
would complicate our current discussion. Therefore,
we have opted to leave this issue aside.
1. The verb and its
morphology: a quick overview.
2. The verb.
2.1. Transitives and
intransitives.
2.1.1. Weather predicates.
2.1.2. Borderline transitive
verbs: Unergatives and others.
2.1.3. Intransitives:
Unaccusatives and others.
2.1.4. Inchoatives.
2.1.5. Causatives.
2.2. Synthetic and
periphrastic.
3. Aspect.
3.1. The perfective.
3.2. The imperfective.
3.2.1. The progressive ari
construction.
3.3. The unrealized.
1. The verb and its morphology: a quick overview.
In this introduction, we will provide a quick
overview of the verb and its morphology in Euskara,
distinguishing some basic components that will be
described in more detail in the following sections.
We will use a few examples as guides. Consider first
a rather simple sentence:
(1)
emakumea heldu da
woman-det arrived is
'the woman has arrived'
The sentence in (1) contains an intransitive verb
heldu 'to arrive'. As an intransitive, it takes one
argument, emakumea 'the woman'. The verb is
accompanied by a third person singular form of the
verb izan 'to be', which is da 'is'.
Let us focus on the verb heldu 'to arrive'. You can
see that, out of the two, this is the most relevant
one as far as the meaning of the sentence is
concerned: the sentence in
(1) talks about an
arrival, not about being. Therefore, we will say
that heldu in
(1) is the
'main verb', and we
will refer to the accompanying da verb as the 'auxiliary
verb'. When talking about all the verbal
material, including main and auxiliary verb, we will
often use the term 'verbal complex'. The main verb
determines what event the sentence refers to,
whether one of arriving, loving, or writing. Now
compare
(1) and (2):
(2)
emakumea heltzen da
woman-det arriving is
'the woman arrives'
The only difference between the two sentences is the
ending of the main verb. Whereas in
(1) the ending was
du (hel+du), in
(2) the ending is
tzen (hel+tzen). The reader should be warned that
the glosses and translations we have provided in
these initial examplesdo not cover exactly the
semantic range of the examples, but from them it can
already be inferred that
(1) expresses an
event of arriving that has already taken place,
whereas
(2) expresses and
event of arriving that is under way but not
completed. These differences in meaning are due to
the
aspect of the verb;
the endings du and tzen on the main verb are
aspectual morphemes. Aspectual morphemes in Euskara
are attached to the end of the main verb.
Let us now focus on the auxiliary verb da 'is'. The
auxiliary verb carries information about
the arguments in the sentence, whether the sentence
is present or past, etc... The form da in
particular, says that there is only one argument in
the sentence, that this argument is a third person,
and that the sentence is present tense. We will now
see a couple of examples where the information the
auxiliary must convey is different, and you will see
that the form of the auxiliary changes accordingly:
(3)
zu heldu zara
you arrived are
'you have arrived'
emakumea heldu zen
woman-det arrived was
'the woman arrived'
In
(3a), the sentence does not contain a
third person subject; this time the subject is a
second person singular
pronoun. The
auxiliary reflects this change, by inflecting for
the form of the verb izan 'to be' that corresponds
to second person singular: zara. In
(3b), the time of the event denoted by
the sentence is not present, but past. Accordingly,
the auxiliary takes the form of the verb izan 'to
be' that corresponds to a third person singular,
past tense: zen. As we will see throughout the
chapter, the information that the verbal complex is
capable of encoding in Euskara can be very
elaborate: it encodes the nature of the subject, and
also of the object and the indirect object, if there
are any; it encodes modality variations, and it can
even encode the gender of the person we talk to. We
will consider all these issues under the name of
Inflection.
Sometimes, we find sentences that have a single
verb, as the ones in
(4), which do not
display a main verb and an auxiliary:
(4)
Zuk asko dakizu
You-E much it-know-you
'you know a lot'
nire gurarien kontra naramazue zuek ni hara
I-gen desire-genpl against me-take-youpl youpl-E I-A
there
'You are taking me there against my will'
In
(4a), we find a form of the verb jakin
'to know'. You can see the root of this verb, aki,
inside the form in the example: d-aki-zu
'you-know-it'. The surrounding morphemes are
indications of the type of arguments this verb takes
in this sentence: first, an indication that the
object of the verb is a third person
d, then, an
indication that the subject of the verb is a second
person singular
zu 'you'. From the form of the morpheme
corresponding to the third person object d, plus
lack of any other specification regarding tense, we
conclude that it is present.
In
(4b), we find a
form of the verb eraman 'to take (away)'. You can
find the root of this verb (rama) inside the form in
the example: na-rama-zue 'me-take-you(plural)'. The
surrounding morphemes tell us how many and what kind
of arguments the verb takes: the morpheme
na indicates that
the object is first person singular, and the
morpheme
zue indicates that
the subject is a second person plural. Since there
is no manifest indication for tense, we conclude
that it is present.
These verbs that bring together the main verb and
the inflection are called
synthetic verbs in
the Basque grammatical tradition, and the complex
ones illustrated in
(1),
(2),
(3) are called
periphrastic verbs.
Regarding word order in the verbal complex, see
section 1 in chapter 1.
2. The verb.
We will start out with the verb, leaving for later
considerations concerning
aspect and
inflection. Here,
we will look at different types of verbs, regarding
two parameters:
transitivity on the
one hand, and the way in which they inflect on the
other. As you will see,
causative verbs
have been included in the transitivity parameter,
given the fact that they add one more actant to the
array of actants of the base verb.
Verbs in Euskara are named in their
perfective form.
That is, when we refer to a verb such as heldu 'to
arrive', the form we quote is not the bare verbal
root, which, as we saw in examples
(1) and
(2) above, is
actually hel. The form quoted is the combination of
the verbal root and the perfective aspectual
morpheme, which together form a perfective
participle. As we will see throughout the chapter,
some verbal inflections make use of the root alone,
for instance the formation of
causatives, or
inflected forms containing modals, as in hel daiteke
's/he can arrive'. Nevertheless, in referring to
verbs we will use the standard usage of quoting the
perfective participle, despite the fact that it is
morphologically complex.
2.1. Transitives and intransitives. Verbs can be
transitive or intransitive: transitive verbs are
those that have a subject and an object,
intransitive verbs lack an object. In general,
transitive and intransitive verbs in Euskara behave
differently: transitives display a subject marked
with
ergative case, and an object marked with
absolutive case
(5a). Intransitives display a subject marked with
absolutive case (5b):
(5)
txakurrak katua ikusi du
dog-det-E cat-det-A see-prf has
'the dog has seen the cat'
katua joan da
cat-det-A gone is
'the cat has left'
Another property that distinguishes transitive verbs
from intransitives is the
auxiliary verb they display: transitive
predicates take forms of the verb ukan 'to have' for
auxiliaries
(5a), whereas
intransitives take forms of the verb izan 'to be'
for auxiliaries
(5b).
As for the verbs themselves, however, there is no
special morpheme signaling whether a given verb is
transitive or intransitive. Transitivity is
manifested in the number of arguments, the
cases they bear,
and the
auxiliary selected.
2.1.1. Weather predicates. Weather predicates
constitute a special class of transitives: they do
not express their
ergative argument.
Consider (6):
(6)
gaur euria egin du
today rain-det made has
'it has rained today'
The sentence in (6) contains an
absolutive Noun
phrase, euria 'the rain', and a transitive verb egin
'make, do'. The auxiliary selected is a form of ukan
'to have', inflected for present tense, third person
object and third person subject. However, there is
no expressed ergative Noun phrase, nor can there be.
Other weather predicates are illustrated in (7):
(7)
Gorbeian elurra egiten du neguan
Gorbea-in snow-det make-hab has winter-in
'In Gorbea, it snows in the winter'
(literally: 'In Gorbea, (it) makes (a) snow in
winter')
haize handia egingo du bihar
wind big-det make-irr has tomorrow
'tomorrow there will be big winds'
(literally: 'tomorrow (it) will make a big wind')
As you can see in the examples, there are no weather
verbs in Euskara, strictly speaking. Rather, weather
predicates are composed of the verb egin 'to make,
do', and the corresponding meteorological phenomenon
in a determined Noun phrase, inflected for
absolutive case.
2.1.2. Borderline transitive verbs: unergatives.
There are some verbs that are intransitive in
English (and other languages), but take subjects
marked with ergative case, and
'have' auxiliaries
in Euskara. Out of these, we can distinguish two
groups. The smaller one has been considered in
section
1.2. of chapter 3.
The larger group is constituted by
unergative
predicates. Examples are given in (8):
(8)
umeak barre egin du
child-det-E laugh made has
'the child has laughed'
irakasleak hitz egin du
teacher-det-E word made has
'the teacher has spoken'
These predicates have certain similarities with the
weather predicates reviewed above: what translates
in English as a single verb appears to be rendered
in Euskara by the combination of the verb egin and a
direct object. In the case of weather verbs, the
direct object is the meteorological phenomenon; in
the case of these unergative predicates, the direct
object is the Noun referring to the activity: barre
egin 'make laugh(ter)'. However, there is an
important difference between objects of weather
predicates and objects of these unergative
predicates: whereas the former carry a
determiner a, the
latter do not. For this reason, there is no shared
agreement among linguists as to whether the
predicates in (8) are a special class of transitive
predicates with determinerless objects, or whether
they are a special class of intransitives that mark
their subject with ergative case (Levin
(1983)).
Favoring the first view is the fact that the
relation between the activity Noun and the verb egin
is not one of compounding. The Noun and the verb can
be separated (9a), and the Noun can receive the
partitive marker (9b):
(9)
nork egin du barre?
who-E made has laugh
'who has laughed?'
nik ez dut barrerik egiten
I-E not have laugh-prt made-hab
'I don't laugh'
Favoring the second view is the fact that not all
predicates of the type in (8) permit operations like
(9). The best known case is alde egin 'to leave'
(literally, 'side make'), which we illustrate in
(10):
(10)
umeak alde egin du
child-det-E side made has
'the child has left'
nork alde egin du
who side made has
'who has left?'
*nork egin du alde?
who made has side
nik ez dut alde egin
I-E not have side made
'I have not left'
*nik ez dut alderik egin
I-E not have side-prt made
Many of the unergative predicates in this class
behave like the one in (9), while others are closer
to the examples in (10).
Other predicates in this general unergative class
include: amets egin 'to dream', dantza egin 'to
dance', dehadar egin 'to scream', eztul egin 'to
cough', izerdi egin 'to sweat', kaka egin 'to shit',
lan egin 'to work', lo egin 'to sleep', negar egin
'to cry' so egin 'to look at' txiza egin 'to pee',
zintz egin 'to blow the nose'.
A second fact that favors the view of these
unergatives as a special kind of transitives is that
they do not allow for the presence of another,
so-called 'cognate' object in the sentence:
(11)
*amets eder bat amets egin dut
dream beautiful one dream made have-I
('I have dreamt a beautiful dream')
*ezpatadantza dantza egin dute
sword dance dance made have-they
('they have danced the sword dance')
Some of the unergatives in this group have variants
that consist of a verb, not of a complex predicate:
(12)
dantzariek berehala dantzatuko dute
dancer-detpl-E immediately dance-irr have-they
'the dancers will dance immediately'
in these variants, the presence of an object is
allowed. Compare (11b) and (13):
(13)
dantzariek ezpatadantza dantzatuko dute orain
dancer-detpl-E sword dance-det dance-irr have-they
now
'the dancers will dance the sword dance now'
However, there are a few unergative predicates, such
as funtzionatu 'to function', dimititu 'to resign',
frenatu 'to brake', that consist of a simple verb,
which assign ergative to the subject and still do
not allow for the presence of an object:
(14)
makina honek ez du funtzionatzen
machine this-E not has function-hab
'this machine does not work'
parlamentariak dimititu du azkenik
parlament-member-det-E resigned has finally
'the parliament member has finally resigned'
Finally, some unergative verbs display different
behaviors depending on dialectal variation. Thus,
for instance, verbs like bazkaldu 'to lunch', or
afaldu 'to dine', mark their subjects with ergative
case in western varieties (15a), but with absolutive
case in eastern varieties (15b). Accordingly, they
select auxiliary 'have' in western usage, but
auxiliary 'be' in eastern usage:
(15)
neba-arrebek elkarrekin bazkaldu dute
brother-sister-detpl-E each-other-with lunched
have-they
'the brothers and sisters have lunched together'
senide guztiak elkarrekin bazkaldu dira
relative all-detpl each-other-with lunched are
'all the relatives have lunched together'
2.1.3. Unaccusatives. The group of true intransitive
verbs in Euskara is mostly constituted of
unaccusative verbs.
That is, most verbs that mark their subjects with
absolutive case and
select 'be' auxiliaries
fall naturally in the class of unaccusatives. Some
examples are provided in (16):
(16)
astoa erori da
donkey-det fallen is
'the donkey has fallen'
umea jaio da
child-det be-born is
'the child has been born'
ikasleok azken iladetan jezartzen gara
student-detpl last row-detpl-in sit-hab are
'(we) students sit in the last rows'
To this big group, a few other must be added, which
do not fall in the unaccusative class. One of them
is the group of unergative predicates in eastern
usage, discussed regarding example
(15b) immediately before this section.
A second important group is constituted by
impersonal sentences, which involve in Euskara a
ditransitivization process, out of which an
intransitive emerges, formally identical to the ones
in
(16). Consider the
pair in (17):
(17)
norbaitek etxea saldu du
someone-E house-det sold has
'someone has sold the house'
etxea saldu da
house sold is
'the house has been sold'
(17a) is a standard
transitive sentence with an indefinite subject. In
(17b) we have an
impersonal sentence, where the subject of the verb
saldu 'to sell' has been taken out of the sentence.
As a result, the
auxiliary becomes a
form of 'be', and the only argument of the sentence
is marked
absolutive, as it
was in the transitive version.
2.1.4. Inchoatives. Inchoatives, or causative
alternations as they are also called, involve
contrasts that are formally identical to the one
illustrated in
(17). Thus,
consider a verb like apurtu 'to break', which has an
inchoative form (18a) and an unaccusative form
(18b):
(18)
umeak jostailua apurtu du
child-det-E toy-det broken has
'the child has broken the toy'
jostailua apurtu da
toy-det broken is
'the toy has broken'
As you can judge from the example given, there is no
specific inchoative morphology on the verb, and the
pair involves simply the addition (or subtraction,
depending on your point of view) of one argument to
the sentence.
2.1.5.
Causatives.
Causative verbs are constructed by adding the
causative verb arazi 'to cause' to the root of base
verb, as illustrated in (19):
(19)
arazo hau ikuserazi digute
problem this see-cause it-have-us-they
'they have made us see this problem'
himnoa kantaerazten diete umeei
anthem-det sing-cause-hab it-have-them-they
child-detpl-D
'They make children sing the anthem'
2.2. Synthetic and periphrastic. The distinction
between synthetic and periphrastic verbs has been
briefly illustrated in examples
(3) and
(4) in the
introductory section to this chapter. The
distinction concerns the manner in which verbs
inflect:
(I) a synthetic verb is a verb that inflects without
the help of an
auxiliary verb
(II) a periphrastic verb is a verb that must inflect
with the help of an
auxiliary verb.
This said, it must be noted that the terms synthetic
and periphrastic are used ambiguously to refer
either to:
(a) verbs that can
inflect synthetically, such as jakin 'to know',
versus verbs that can only inflect periphrastically,
such as tolostu 'to fold', or
(b) particular
verbal forms that are synthetic, such as
dakizu
'it-know-you' (you know), versus particular verbal
forms that are periphrastic, such as jakin dezakezu
'know it-have-pot-you' (you can know).
We will start by considering the opposition in
(a), and will then
focus on the opposition in
(b), which will
become a natural introduction to the category
aspect, to be
discussed in the next section.
(a) Verbs that can inflect synthetically: The number
of verbs that can inflect some of their forms
synthetically is very small, compared to the entire
set of verbs in Euskara. The overwhelming majority
of verbs can only inflect with the help of an
auxiliary verb. Older stages of the language had a
much larger set of synthetic verbs (see
Lafon (1944)). The
grammar of the Royal Academy of Basque Language (EGLU)
estimates that in modern spoken Basque there are
only about ten verbs where synthetic form are used:
egon 'stay', joan 'go', etorri 'arrive', ibili
'walk', izan 'to be', jakin 'know', eduki 'have',
ekarri 'bring', eraman 'take', ihardun 'engage'.
Some other verbs, like jarin 'to ooze, to flow',
erabili 'to use', irudi 'to look like', esan 'to
say' are used synthetically only in a few forms, and
finally there is a third set of verbs, like atxeki
'attach', jarraiki 'follow', esan 'say', eman 'give'
or entzun 'hear', which are occasionally used in
synthetic fashion in literary language.
It is not at all clear what syntactic or semantic
feature, if any, defines the set of synthetic verbs;
as far as modern Euskara is concerned, it appears to
be a lexical idiosyncracy of the verbs listed above.
It must be noted, however, that all synthetic verbs
have the older participial endings (n, I), not the
nowadays productive one (tu), which was borrowed
from Latin. Hence, all synthetic verbs are 'old
verbs' in this sense, but not all the 'old verbs'
belong in the synthetic class. In general, both the
number of verbs that can inflect synthetically, and
the number of forms that are used synthetically
within the paradigms of those verbs appears to be
getting progressively smaller, some forms become
more and more literary as they are used less often
in spoken language.
(b) Synthetically inflected forms: synthetic forms
have the same morphological markers as periphrastic
forms with one exception: they contain no visible
aspect marker. Let
us see this by comparing a periphrastic and a
synthetic form of the verb ekarri 'to bring':
(20)
Mikelek katakume bat ekarri du
Mikel-E kitten one bring-prf has
'Mikel has brought a kitten'
Mikelek katakume bat dakar
Mikel-E kitten one brings
'Mikel brings a kitten'
Let us first consider the morphology of the two verb
forms. In
(20a), the root of
the verb, ekar takes a
perfective
aspectual morpheme i and forms the perfective
participial. Following it we find the auxiliary verb
du, which contains a morpheme
d, which appears in
present tense forms when the absolutive phrase is
third person, and a morpheme u, the root of the verb
ukan. Lack of any
other visible specification entails that the
ergative phrase is third person singular. In
(20b), the only
morphemes missing are the
perfective marker i
and the root of the
auxiliary u. Thus,
the form dakar contains the root of the verb, kar,
and the morpheme d for present tense and third
person absolutive. Comparing the perfective
participle in
(20a) and the
synthetic form in
(20b), you have
probably noticed that the initial e in
(20a) is also
missing in
(20b). This initial
vowel does not appear to be a morpheme, but rather,
a superficial phonological addition to the root.
Thus, the relevant differences between
(20a) and
(20b) are the
perfective marker,
and the root of the
auxiliary. The very
name of 'auxiliary' indicates that these types of
verbs are thought to appear when for some reason the
verb is not capable of carrying the verbal
morphology on itself. Put differently, it is
probably the case that the auxiliary is contingent
on the presence of the perfective marker, a
consequence of it. If this is the case, then the
only relevant difference between
(20a) and
(20b) is the
presence of the perfective marker in
(20a), and its
absence in
(20b).
Considering the meaning of the examples, whereas
(20a) has a perfective meaning (it talks
about a completed event of bringing),
(20b) does not. The
meaning of
(20b), is that
'Mikel is now bringing a kitten'. Hence, the
sentence talks about an
imperfective event,
one that is talked about as it is happening. Put
more technically,
(20b) has a
punctual aspect.
Synthetic forms are only possible when the aspectual
specification is punctual. Synthetic forms can be
specified for either present
(20b) or past tense
(21a). They can also be specified for
modality
(21b) (even though this usage is almost
exclusively literary), and they can carry as many
agreement morphemes
as
periphrastic forms
do
(21c):
(21)
Mikelek katakume bat zekarren
Mikel-E kitten one brought
'Mikel was bringing a kitten'
Mikelek katakume bat dakarke
Mikel-E kitten one bring-can
'Mikel can bring a kitten'
Zuek ni nakarzue
You-E I me-bring-you
'You(guys) (are) bring(ing) me'
Once a given verb belongs to the synthetic group,
the relevant issue that determines whether it will
display a synthetic or a periphrastic form is verbal
aspect. Synthetic
forms can never convey
perfective,
habitual or
future events.
These distinctions depend crucially on the aspectual
category in Euskara. The place of aspect in the
verbal morphology of Euskara is discussed in the
next section.
3. Aspect.
Many different phenomena are classified under the
name tag 'aspect' in linguistics, and everyone
agrees that this is a still rather poorly understood
area of human language. In order to clarify matters
in this description, we will approach the discussion
on aspect from a strictly formal pont of view. That
is, the criteria that guides this section rests on
the morphological distinctions found in Euskara, and
the various phenomena they give raise to. The expert
on aspect will find that many issues related to
aspect in a broader sense, are not touched upon
here.
We group under the category 'aspect' the morphemes
that appear attached to the verbal root in
periphrastic forms.
These are basically three:
1.
The perfective,
which denotes a completed event.
2.
The imperfective,
which denotes an ongoing, non-completed event.
3.
The unrealized,
which denotes an event that has not even started
taking place.
It must be noted that no overt aspect marker
surfaces when the inflected auxiliary is a
potential form,
involving the modal morpheme ke. In those cases, the
root of the verb is used, as shown in
the examples
provided when discussing those forms.
3.1. The perfective. The perfective morpheme can
have three forms, depending on the verb: tu, i, n.
The morpheme tu is the most frequent one. It was
borrowed from Latin (dictum). All verbs of new
creation must take this morpheme in their perfective
form; that is, it is the unmarked one of the set.
After the sounds n and l, it becomes du, for
instance in lagundu 'to help'. The morphemes i and n
are the older perfective markers. The perfective
morpheme indicates a completed action, either in the
present
(22a) or in the
past
(22b):
(22)
Olatz poztu da
Olatz rejoice-perf is
'Olatz has rejoiced'
Olatz poztu zen
Olatz rejoice-prf was
'Olatz rejoiced'
In
(22a), the
perfective participle poztu takes a present tense
auxiliary da 'is'. The result is a present tense
perfective form. In
(22b), the same participle takes a past
tense auxiliary zen 'was', and the result is a past
tense perfective form.Perfective forms must always
carry an
auxiliary verb;
they can never inflect synthetically.
As mentioned in the beginning of
section 1 of this
chapter, the perfective participle is the form used
for naming verbs. Regarding perfective participials
in adjective function, see
3.1.1. of chapter 2.
3.2. The imperfective. The imperfective morpheme is
tzen, sometimes surfacing as ten. In the case of
verbs that do not inflect
synthetically, the
imperfective aspect marker is used both for denoting
a punctual, ongoing event, that is, something that
is happening right now, and for denoting a habitual
event, that is, something that happens with a
certain frequency. Consider the examples in (23):
(23)
Paulek liburua irakurtzen du
Paul-E book-det read-impf has
'Paul reads the book'
Olatz etxean gelditzen da
Olatz house-in stay-impf is
'Olatz stays home'
The sentence in (23a) can be used to refer to an
event that is taking place as the sentence is
uttered. What is meant to say is that Paul is
reading the book. The example can also refer to an
event that takes place with a certain frequency, for
instance, if Paul were in the habit of reading the
book every morning. The same is true of (23b): it
can refer to the event of Olatz staying home right
now, as the rest of us leave, for instance, or it
can be a statement about a habitual event.
In the case of
synthetic forms, as
we pointed out above, matters are slightly
different. A synthetic form denotes a punctual
aspect; in order to convey habituality, the marker
tzen and an auxiliary verb must be used. Consider
the pair in (24):
(24)
Mikelek katakumea dakar
Mikel-E kitten-det brings
'Mikel brings/is bringing the kitten'
Mikelek katakumea ekartzen du
Mikel-E kitten-det bring-impf has
'Mikel brings the kitten'
In (24a), since ekarri 'to bring' is a synthetic
verb, punctuality is conveyed by means of the
synthetic form. That is, (24a) means that Mikel is
bringing the kitten as we speak. The sentence in
(24b), where the verb ekarri takes the imperfective
morpheme, yielding ekartzen, denotes a habitual
event. It could be used if, for instance, Mikel
brought the kitten every time we went on a hike to
the mountains, and we wanted to talk about his habit
of his.
3.2.1. The progressive ari construction. There is a
progressive construction, used mostly in central
varieties of the language. It involves the aspectual
verb ari, which is inserted between the imperfective
participle and the auxiliary, as illustrated in
(25):
(25)
Josune aspertzen ari da
Josune bore-impf prog is
'Josune is getting bored'
The progressive verb ari alters the case pattern of
a transitive sentence. The ergative Noun phrase
surfaces in absolutive, and the auxiliary becomes a
form of izan 'to be', as if the sentence were now
intransitive. The object remains marked for
absolutive as well. This is illustrated in (26),
which can be compared to
(23a):
(26)
Paul liburua irakurtzen ari da
Paul book-det read-impf prog is
'Paul is reading the/a book'
There are a few exceptions to this change in the
case pattern. In eastern varieties, it is reported (EGLU)
that transitive sentences using the progressive ari
may keep
ergative marking,
but it is not clear under what conditions. In
central varieties,
weather predicates
constitute a clearer exception. In weather
predicates, ari is used to denote punctuality, with
or without the help of a participle. The
auxiliary remains a
form of ukan 'to have'. Examples of weather
predicates constructed upon ari are provided in
(27):
(27)
euria ari du orain
rain-det prog has now
'it is raining now'
Occasionally, the ari construction can also be used
with verbs that inflect synthetically as the
examples in (28), (from
EGLU and
Euskaltzaindia (1993))
show:
(28)
liburu honi kolorea joaten ari zaio
book this-D color-det go-impf prog is-to it
'This book is losing its color'
(literally: 'to this book color is leaving')
jendea uholdeka etortzen ari da
people flooding-by come-impf prog is
'People are flooding in'
(literally: 'people are coming by floodings')
In (28a), the synthetic verb joan 'to go, to leave'
takes the periphrastic progressive ari form, and
denotes an event that is taking place as we speak.
It is probably the fact that the fading of the color
takes such a long period of time what makes the use
of ari better suited than the synthetic form of the
verb. In (28b), the verb etorri 'to come' is used in
the ari construction, despite it being a synthetic
verb. In this case, it is probably the fact that the
event described is more episodic than punctual what
makes the use of a periphrastic form more adequate.
The aspectual element ari can be used without a
participle if there is a
locational phrase
that denotes an activity:
(29)
lanean ari naiz
work-in prog am
'I am working'
bertsotan ari gara
verses-in prog are-we
'we are making verses'
Finally, ari itself can be inflected for aspect,
which indicates that it is probably best thought of
as a verb, whose meaning is akin to 'to engage'.
(30)
gaur goizean umeak jolasean aritu dira
today morning-in child-detpl play-in engage-perf are
'Today in the morning the children have been
playing'
bihar goizean umeak jolasean arituko dira
tomorrow morning-in child-detpl play-in engage-irr
are
'tomorrow morning the children will be playing'
3.3. The unrealized. The third aspectual morpheme is
tuko, iko or ngo, depending on the participial form.
That is, verbs that make participials with the
ending tu will make the unrealized as tuko, whereas
verbs that make participials in i make the
unrealized as iko, and verbs whose participials end
in n make their unrealized forms as ngo. The
unrealized is built by adding the morpheme ko to the
perfective participial form. In
eastern varieties,
the morpheme added to the participial form is en
instead of ko.
In most descriptive grammars, this aspect is
commonly referred to as a 'future' marker, but here
we will take it to be an aspectual marker indicating
that an event has not started happening. As we will
see, the marker tuko can yield verbal forms that are
not future, even if the future is one of the verbal
forms it may yield. The unrealized morpheme will be
glossed as irr, for the grammatical term 'irrealis'.
Let us consider a few examples in (31):
(31)
idazle honek eleberri bi idatziko ditu
writer this-E novel two write-irr has
'This writer will write two novels'
hegoak ebaki banizkio, nirea izango zen
wing-detpl cut if-had-I, I-gen-det be-irr was
'If I cut its wings, it would be mine'
In
(31a), we can see a
future verbal form. It is built by combining a main
verb with the unrealized aspect marker, in this case
idatziko, and an
auxiliary in
present tense, in this case ditu a form of ukan 'to
have'. Thus, the future requires an auxiliary in
present tense and the unrealized aspect marker. In
(31b), we see
another use of the unrealized aspect morpheme, which
does not yield a future tense. In this case, we have
a conditional sentence, 'if I cut its wings',
followed by the consequence, which is the one we
focus on. It combines the main verb izan 'to be', to
which the unrealized aspect has been attached,
izango, and this main verb combines now with a past
tense auxiliary verb, zen, a form of the auxiliary
izan, 'to be'.
These examples illustrate the two main uses of this
aspectual marker: with present tense forms it yields
the future, and with past tense or modal forms it
yields conditionals. A few more forms are given in
(32), now using other kinds of conditionals:
(32)
Miren etorriko balitz, Mikel joango litzateke
Miren come-irr if-were, Mikel leave-irr would
'If Miren came, Mikel would leave'
Miren etorri balitz, Mikel joango zatekeen
Miren come if-were, Mikel leave-irr would-have
'Had Miren come, Mikel would have left'
As we can
see in the examples, the unrealized aspect marker is used in the
first part of the conditional in (32a), and in the consequence
as well. In this example, the verbal form of the consequence,
litzateke, includes a modal marker ke. If you consider (32b),
which illustrates a counterfactual conditional, the unrealized
aspect marker surfaces only in the consequence, joango.
1. Verbal Inflection.
1.1. Auxiliary selection.
1.2. Agreement.
1.2.1. How agreement works:
the basics.
1.2.2. The paradigms of
agreement morphology.
1.2.2.1. The persons.
1.2.2.2. Phonological changes.
1.2.2.3. The third person.
1.2.2.4. A few full paradigms
and how to use them.
1.3. Tense: past tense
paradigms.
1.3.1.Past tense and ergative
agreement.
1.4. Modality: the morhemes 'ke'and
'ba'.
1.4.1. Modality and tense.
1.4.2. The modal morpheme 'ke':
potentiality.
1.4.2.1.Potential paradigms:
absolutive.
1.4.2.2.Potential paradigms:
absolutive and dative.
1.4.2.3. Potential paradigms:
absolutive and ergative.
1.4.2.4.Potential
paradigms:absolutive, dative and ergative.
1.4.3. Conditionals.
1. Verbal Inflection.
Let us now leave the main verb and its morphology,
to focus on the information that the auxiliary verb
carries in it. As we saw briefly in the introduction
to this chapter, in the discussion of examples
(1) to
(4), the Inflection
of the verb can carry information about:
(a) the arguments of the verb, not only the subject,
but also the object and the indirect object; whether
they are first, second or third person; whether they
are singular or plural;
(b) the tense of the sentence, whether it is present
or past, or neither of the two;
(c) whether there is a modal force to the sentence
and if so, of what kind;
(d) whether the sentence is matrix or embedded, and
if so, of what kind;
(e) in some varieties, the verbal inflection can
also carry information about the person we are
addressing, whether it is male or female.
1.1. Auxiliary selection. We will start by
considering the different types of auxiliary verbs
that are available. As we have already seen in
section
2.1., through our
discussion of transitivity, there are mainly two
auxiliaries in Euskara: the auxiliary izan 'to be',
and the auxiliary ukan 'to have'. In general terms,
the auxiliary ukan 'to have' is used when there is
an
ergative phrase in
the sentence. Otherwise, the auxiliary izan 'to be'
is used. We illustrate this contrast in (33):
(33)
igela agertu da
frog-det appeared is
'the/a frog has appeared'
Josebak igela ikusi du
Joseba-E frog-det seen has
'Joseba has seen the/a frog'
As the pair illustrates, a sentence with no ergative
phrase like (33a) selects a form of the auxiliary
izan 'to be', in this case a present tense third
person singular form. However, a sentence with an
ergative phrase, such as (33b) selects a form of the
auxiliary ukan 'to have', in this case a present
tense third person singular subject and third person
singular object.
If there is a
dative phrase in
the sentence, it does not affect this basic
contrast, although the morphology of the auxiliary
changes to reflect the dative phrase:
(34)
Aitziberri igela agertu zaio
Aitziber-D frog-det appeared is
'the/a frog appeared to Aitziber'
Josebak Aitziberri igela eman dio
Joseba-E Aitziber-D frog-det given has
'Joseba has given the/a frog to Aitziber'
In the sentences in (34), the auxiliary verbs have
changed their form to reflect the presence of the
dative phrase (we discuss changes of this kind in
the section devoted to
'agreement'), but the auxiliary is a form
of izan 'to be' in (34a) and a form of ukan 'to
have' in (34b).
For the sake of thoroughness, it must be said that
the actual root of the auxiliary verb in (34b)
belongs to an extinct verb *edun (the asterisk here
means that the verb is a 'reconstruction', that is,
historical linguists think this is most plausibly
the participial form of the verb), which can no
longer be used as a normal verb. But in terms of
auxiliary selection, we can group these forms under
the general group of ukan 'to have' auxiliaries.
There is a small number of extinct verbs like *edun
whose roots are used to inflect verbal forms with
modal morphemes, but we will not enter into a
discussion of those in this grammar, and we will
stick to the basic distinction between izan 'be' and
ukan 'have'.
There is one exception to this distribution of
auxiliary verbs: it involves a case where the
auxiliary form used is ukan 'to have' despite the
fact that there is no ergative phrase in the
sentence. This use of ukan in ergative less
sentences takes place when the verbal inflection
carries in it an agreement marker for the addressee
of the speech.
1.2. Agreement. Verbal inflection in Euskara carries
information about the
absolutive phrase
in the sentence, the
ergative phrase if
there is one, and also about the
dative phrase if
there is one. The
auxiliary verb
carries some markers, or morphemes, which indicate
whether these phrases are first or second person,
singular or plural. As we will try to illustrate, it
is also the case that sometimes the absence of
morphemes provides information. Typically, absence
of morphemes indicates the presence of a third
person phrase, as we will see.
1.2.1. How agreement works: the basic combinations.
Let us start with a few examples, as usual:
(35)
ni erori naiz
I fallen am
hi erori haiz
you fallen are
Here, in (35), we see examples of auxiliaries that
provide us with information about the absolutive
phrase in the sentence. The main verb chosen is
intransitive erori
'to fall', therefore it only takes an absolutive
phrase, and it takes as an
auxiliary verb a
form of the verb izan 'to be'. In
(35a), the
absolutive phrase happens to be a first person
singular
pronoun ni 'I'. The
auxiliary verb reflects this fact, by means of the
morpheme n, which only appears if there is a first
person singular absolutive phrase in the sentence.
In
(35b), the
absolutive phrase happens to be a second person
singular pronoun hi 'you'. The auxiliary verb
reflects this fact, now by means of the morpheme h,
which only appears if there is a second person
singular absolutive phrase in the sentence.
The reader must remember that when we talk about the
presence of a given phrase in the sentence, we do
not necessarily mean that the phrase is overtly
manifest in the sentence. Thus, for instance, in the
examples in
(35), the agreement markers in the
auxiliary must be there regardless of whether the
pronouns are manifest or
absent. What we mean by the presence of a
phrase is that the phrase is part of the sentence,
whether manifest or not.
As we have seen in
(35), then,
whenever there is a first person singular absolutive
phrase, the morpheme n will appear in the
inflection. Let us see another example, which
incorporates a first person singular absolutive
phrase, and something else:
(36)
hik ni ikusi n-au-k
you-E I seen me-have-you(male)
'You have seen me'
Comparing
(36) and
(35a) we see that
the main verb is no longer the intransitive erori
'to fall', but rather a
transitive, ikusi
'to see'. Accordingly, there is an ergative phrase,
hik 'you', that is, a second person singular
ergative phrase, and the auxiliary is now a form of
ukan 'to have'. As you can see for yourself by
comparing
(35a) and
(36), what concerns
the absolutive first person singular has not
changed: the marker continues to be n, and it sits
in the same position in the auxiliary, that is, at
the beginning. What has changed is the morphological
material that accompanies the first person singular
marker. Thus for instance, the root of the auxiliary
is no longer aiz, as in
(35a), but au, the
root the verb
ukan 'to have'. And
following the root of the auxiliary verb we find a
morpheme for the ergative phrase. In this case, the
morpheme is k, which reflects the fact that the
ergative phrase is a second person singular, and
moreover, that the individual the ergative phrase
denotes is
male.
You can see that the glosses of example
(36) include this
information, and that the example itself contains
dashes separating the morphemes. We will continue
doing this, in order to clarify the workings of the
agreement morphology. In separating inflectional
morphemes, we will try to make only those
separations that are relevant to this discussion,
glossing over others that are not. In particular,
you will notice that the examples
gloss over certain
changes in the root area, that would complicate our
description of the mechanics of the agreement
system.
Looking at
(36), you can see
that:
(a) the marker corresponding to the
absolutive phrase
appears at the beginning of the inflected
auxiliary, and
(b) the marker corresponding to the
ergative phrase
appears at the end of the inflected auxiliary, or at
least it appears following the root of the verb. One
more form will confirm this:
(37)
Nik hi ikusi h-au-t
I-E you seen you-have-me
'I have seen you'
In
(37), the
absolutive phrase is a second person singular
pronoun, therefore the morpheme at the beginning of
the auxiliary is h, the same one we find in
(35b). The ergative
phrase is a first person singular pronoun, and the t
morpheme at the end of the auxiliary reflects this.
The root is the same as in
(36), only the
agreement markers have changed.
Now let us consider a few examples that contain
dative phrases as
well. First, consider the sentences in (38), which
are the equivalents of
(35), with dative
phrases added:
(38)
ni hiri erori n-atzai-k
I you-D fallen me-be-you(male)
'I have fallen on you'
hi niri erori h-atzai-t
you me-D fallen you-be-me
'You have fallen on me'
In
(38a), there is a
dative phrase hiri 'to you', which is reflected in
the auxiliary verb. As you can see, the morpheme for
the dative second person singular pronoun is k, and
it follows the root of izan 'to be', which is in
this case atzai. The morpheme for the first person
singular absolutive continues to be n, of course,
and it sits at the beginning of the auxiliary. If
you now consider
(38b), you will see that the agreement
morpheme for the dative first person singular
pronoun is t, and it also appears following the root
atzai.
If you compare the forms in
(36),
(37) and
(38), you can see
that the agreement morphemes for the ergative
phrases and the morphemes for the dative phrases are
identical, k for second person singular male and t
for first person singular. Moreover, these agreement
morphemes appear after the root in both cases. So
how are they distinguished? In the case of the
examples we are considering here, the root of the
auxiliary is different: in the cases where the
morpheme signals the presence of an ergative phrase
(36),
(37), the root is
au, that is, the auxiliary is a form of
ukan 'to have'. But
in the cases where the morpheme signals the presence
of a dative phrase
(38), the root is
atzai, that is, the auxiliary is a form of
izan 'to be'.
Remember that ukan 'to have' is used as an auxiliary
only if there is an ergative phrase in the sentence.
Therefore, the morphemes in
(38) correspond necessarily to dative
phrases, since the auxiliary is a form of izan 'to
be'.
Now we need to know how to handle a sentence where
there are both ergative and dative phrases. Let us
pick a couple of examples:
(39)
Nik hiri liburu bat oparitu d-i-a-t
I-E you-D book one present-made it-have-you-me
'I have given you a book (as a present)'
Hik niri liburu bat oparitu d-i-da-k
You-E I-D book one present-made it-have-me-you
'You have given me a book (as a present)'
Consider first the example in
(39a): it is a sentence with an
absolutive phrase liburu bat 'one/a book', an
ergative phrase 'nik' 'I', and a dative phrase hiri
'to you'. The main verb is oparitu 'to make a
present', which displays perfective
aspect. The
auxiliary verb contains the following elements, from
left to right:
(a) the morpheme d, which appears in present tense
forms if the absolutive phrase is a third person, as
it is in this case;
(b) the morpheme i, the root of the auxiliary verb,
which appears in this form only when there are both
a dative and an ergative phrase in the sentence;
(c) the morpheme a, which indicates that the dative
phrase is a second person singular male;
(d) and the morpheme t, which indicates that the
ergative phrase is a first person singular.
Now consider
(39b), which
contrasts minimally with
(39a): the morphemes are the same, except
for the ones corresponding to dative and ergative.
The morpheme corresponding to the dative is now da,
which indicates first person singular, and the
morpheme corresponding to the ergative is now k,
indicating second person singular male.
As you have seen in these examples, the ergative
agreement morpheme is the one that appears last. The
dative morpheme appears after the root of the
auxiliary, but it precedes an ergative morpheme if
there is one. The absolutive morpheme appears at the
beginning of the auxiliary verb.
Hopefully, the discussion of these examples has
shown you that building an auxiliary form in Euskara,
with all its agreement markers, is just a matter of
putting a few pieces together. All you have to know
is what the pieces are, and where they belong. So
let us now take a look at the inventory of pieces,
what linguists would call the paradigms of agreement
morphology.
1.2.2. The paradigms of agreement morphology. Here
we will provide the different morphemes that
correspond to the different persons in the agreement
morphology, depending on whether they correspond to
absolutive, dative or ergative phrases in the
sentence. The rest of the variables in the auxiliary
verb will be kept constant, and will be discussed
later. That is, we will stick to present tense
forms, without modal markers. The only element that
will vary is the root of the auxiliary, as you have
already seen in the examples discussed above.
Only three paradigms are necessary, one for each
case. Thus, we will
have an absolutive paradigm, a dative paradigm and
an ergative paradigm. In order to construct an
inflected form the relevant morpheme is selected
from the relevant paradigm, and placed in the
appropriate position: the absolutive morpheme
immediately before the root, the dative morpheme
immediately after the root, and then the ergative
morpheme.
Let us first see the agreement paradigms in
isolation, and we will then combine them with the
auxiliary roots to create actual inflected forms.
Underneath the case names, you find in brackets the
names those cases receive in Euskara. The cases are
named after the personal
interrogative pronoun,
inflected for the corresponding case:
NOR is 'who' in absolutive, and the name of the
absolutive case and agreement paradigm;
NORI is 'who' with the dative case morpheme, and the
name of the dative case and agreement paradigm;
NORK is 'who' with the ergative case morpheme, and
the name of the ergative case and agreement
paradigm. If you ever decide to learn the language,
that is how you will learn to name the cases and the
verbal paradigms according to the number of cases
they reflect.
|
PERSONS |
ABSOLUTIVE
(NOR) |
DATIVE
(NORI) |
ERGATIVE
(NORK) |
|
NI |
N |
T/ DA |
T/DA |
|
.......
male
HI
.......female |
H |
K/A |
K/A |
|
H |
N/NA |
N/NA |
|
HURA |
(D) |
O |
- |
|
GU |
G |
GU |
GU |
|
ZU |
Z |
ZU |
ZU |
|
ZUEK |
Z |
ZUE |
ZUE |
|
HAIEK |
(D) |
E
|
TE |
Let us now discuss a few issues concerning these
paradigms.
1.2.2.1. The persons. Starting from left to right,
let us consider the column corresponding to the
person
distinctions. You see that there are seven different
categories in that column. The first three are
singular persons, the first (ni), the second (hi)
and the third (hura). The next four belong to the
set of plural persons. Here we find the first person
plural (gu), and two second person plurals, zu and
zuek, which have been distinguished in the paradigm
by calling the first one 'second person plural', and
the second one 'second person plural plural'.
In older stages of the language, there was only one
second person plural, zu. Later, this pronoun
started being used as a polite form of addressing,
and finally it took the place of a polite second
person singular. A new second person pronoun was
created, zuek, to denote only second person plural.
As you can see and will see later, the morphology of
zu makes it similar to plural forms, even though its
meaning is nowadays singular. This is the reason why
there are two second person forms in the verbal
paradigms of modern Euskara, the original one, zu,
and the second one, zuek, created on top of the
original one.
1.2.2.2. Phonological changes. If you consider the
dative and ergative paradigms, you will see that the
first two persons in the singular group have two
different markers. The one on the left is the one
that surfaces if it happens to be at the end of the
form. The one on the right is the one that surfaces
if it happens to be followed by other morphemes.
This alternation has already been illustrated in the
examples in (39).
1.2.2.3. The third person. You can see that the
morpheme corresponding to the third person singular
and the third person plural appears in brackets.
This is due to the fact that the shape of the third
person morpheme varies depending on the paradigm and
the tense or modality of the verbal form. Thus, for
instance, in present tense paradigms, like the ones
we discuss here, it is often a d that surfaces, and
that is what the paradigms above show. In past tense
forms, the third person marker can be a z, or
nothing at all, and in forms with
modals it can also
be a l morpheme. We will discuss these variations
when addressing the morphology of
tense.
1.2.2.4. A few full paradigms and how to use them.
Let us now consider a few actual paradigms of
auxiliary verbs, where the agreement paradigms seen
above are combined with auxiliary roots.
Let us start with a paradigm containing only
absolutive agreement. The auxiliary root corresponds
to the verb izan 'to be'. The following paradigm in
(40) is thus both the auxiliary verb for
intransitive verbs, and the paradigm for the verb
'to be'.
(40)
|
PERSON
NI
HI
HURA
GU
ZU
ZUEK
HAIEK |
NOR
absolutive
N
H
D
G
Z
Z
D |
ROOT
AIZ
AIZ
A
ARA
ARA
ARETE
IRA |
In this paradigm, the root varies quite a lot. It is
often the case across languages that the paradigm of
the verb 'to be', one of the most used verbs,
presents a high degree of irregularity, and Euskara
is no exception to this.
Consider now the paradigm of an auxiliary verb
containing absolutive and a dative agreement. In the
Basque grammatical tradition, the paradigm in (41)
is called a NOR-NORI paradigm:
(41)
|
PERSON |
NOR |
ROOT |
NORI |
|
NI
HI
HURA
GU
ZU
ZUEK
HAIEK |
NA
HA
-
GA
ZA
ZA
- |
TZAI
TZAI
ZAI
TZAI ZKI
TZAI ZKI
TZAI ZKI
ZAI ZKI |
T
K/N
O
GU
ZU
ZUE TE
E |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Let us see how this paradigm works. In order to
obtain the actual forms, what you have to do is pick
the morpheme you need from each column, and put them
together in the order indicated by the paradigm. For
instance, suppose we had a sentence with a first
person absolutive pronoun, and a second person
plural (by this we mean zuek) dative pronoun. The
sentence could be something like (42):
(42)
ni zuei etorri ........
I you-D come
In order to complete this sentence, we look in the
NOR column and we select the morpheme corresponding
to the first person singular: na. Now we take the
root of the
auxiliary, tzai,
and then we select the morpheme corresponding to
zuek in the NORI column, which is zue. We put all
these together in the order NOR-ROOT-NORI, and the
form is created: natzaizue. This is indeed the form
needed to complete the sentence in (42):
(42)
ni zuei etorri natzaizue
I you-D come me-be-you
'I have come to you (plural)'
You have probably noticed that the plural persons
have an extra morpheme te after the root. This
morpheme indicates plurality of the absolutive
phrase, so it is used when the sentence contains a
plural
absolutive phrase. For instance, suppose
we have a sentence like (43):
(43)
gu amamari bisita egitera joan ......
we grandmother-D visit-det make-to gone
where the absolutive phrase is a first person plural
pronoun gu 'we'. We look in the NOR column and we
find the morpheme ga. Then we take the root tzai.
Now, after the root morpheme we must also select the
plural morpheme zki, and now we can consider the
dative morpheme. In the sentence in (43), the dative
morpheme is a third person singular amamari 'to
grandmother', so we must select the morpheme o. We
put everything together, and the resulting form is:
gatzaizkio. Now we can complete our sentence:
(43)
gu amamari bisita egitera joan gatzaizkio
we grandmother-D visit-det make-to gone we-be-pl-her
'we have gone to grandmother to make a visit'
In the familiar second person singular hi, you can
find two morphemes in the NORI (dative) column. The
first one (k) corresponds to a male, the second one
(n) to a female (gender).
This is the only person where the morphology makes
distinctions according to sex, and it only makes
them in the NORI (dative) and NORK (ergative)
paradigms. Compare the two examples in (44):
(44)
gu hiri laguntzera etorriko gatzaizkik
we you-D help-to come-irr we-be-pl-you(male)
'We will come to you(male) to help'
gu hiri laguntzera etorriko gatzaizkin
we you-D help-to come-irr we-be-pl-you(female)
'We will come to you(female) to help'
The third person singular and third person plural
have zero morphemes in the NOR (absolutive) column.
Thus, the forms for sentences with third person
absolutive phrases look like the ones illustrated in
(45):
(45)
aititeri txapela erori zaio
grandfather-D hat fallen it-be-him
'The hat fell (to)from grandfather'
amamari betaurrekoak erori zaizkio
grandmother-D glasses-detpl fallen it-be-pl-her
'The glasses fell (to)from grandmother'
Finally, note that there is a te morpheme following
the NORI column and corresponding to the second
person plural zuek. This te morpheme belongs to the
NOR column, and it is used when the absolutive
phrase is the pronoun
zuek. It
distinguishes a form where the absolutive phrase is
the second person singular zu, from the plural with
zuek, since only the latter adds this extra plural
te marker at the end of the form. To see this with
an example, consider the contrast in (46):
(46)
niri zu gustatzen zatzaizkit
I-D you like-impf you-be-pl-me
'I like you(sing)'
niri zuek gustatzen zatzaizkidate
I-D you like-impf you-be-pl-me-pl
'I like you(pl)'
Now let us consider another paradigm, this one
including NOR (absolutive), NORI (dative) and NORK
(ergative) agreement morphemes. First, let us see
what the paradigm looks like and then we will see
how to use it with examples. The paradigm in (47) is
known as a NOR-NORI-NORK paradigm.
(47)
|
PERSON
NI
HI
HURA
GU
ZU
ZUEK
HAIEK |
NOR
D
D |
ROOT
I
I
I
I
I
I
I ZKI |
NORI
T(DA)
K(A)/N(NA)
O
GU
ZU
ZUE
E |
NORK
T
K/N
-
GU
ZU
ZUE
TE |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The first thing you probably noticed looking at
this paradigm is
that the NOR column only contains morphemes for
third person, singular and plural. The reason is
that there is a restriction in the NOR paradigm of
NOR- NORI-NORK forms. Inflected forms with three
agreement morphemes can only have third person
agreement in the absolutive
(48a). It is not
possible to have auxiliaries that agree with three
arguments if the absolutive agreement is first or
second person. This is illustrated in
(48b), where the
form has been made up for this example. Although it
is possible to combine the different morphemes that
would yield the desired output, the combination is
nevertheless
ungrammatical.
(48)
a.Zuk niri liburua saldu d-i-da-zu
you-E I-D book-det sold it-have-me-you
'You have sold me the book'
b.*zuk harakinari ni saldu n-(a)i-o-zu
you-E butcher-D I sold me-have-him-you
'You have sold me to the butcher'
It is important to note that this restriction
concerns only the
inflection of Euskara. In infinitival
sentences, which contain no overt auxiliary or
agreement morphology, it is possible to have
sentences like
(48b). Thus, consider (49):
(49)
gaizki iruditzen zait [ zuk ni harakinari saltzea]
wrong look-impf it-be-me you-E me-A butcher-D sell-inf
'It seems wrong to me for you to sell me to the
butcher'
As you can also see by looking at
the paradigm, the
only difference between third person singular and
third person plural is the plural marker zki that
appears after the root in the third person plural.
If you consider the NORI
column, you will
see that first and second person morphemes come in
two different shapes, one of which appears in
brackets. The first form, the one that is not in
brackets, surfaces if it happens to be the last
morpheme of the auxiliary verb, and the one in
brackets surfaces if there are other morphemes
following. As we have seen
before, the familiar second person hi has
different morphemes in the dative and the ergative,
depending on whether the individual it denotes is
male or female.
Now we are ready to construct a few examples.
Consider a sentence like (51):
(51)
guk zuri liburu hau eman ......
we-E you-D book this given
The auxiliary needed
here involves a third person singular NOR
(absolutive), which is d. Then comes the root, which
is i. Then we need a polite second person dative,
which is zu. Finally, we need a first person plural
ergative, which is gu. The form is dizugu:
(51)
guk zuri liburu hau eman dizugu
we-E you-D book this given it-have-you-we
'We have given you this book'
Let us try one more. Consider a sentence like (52):
(52)
gurasoek niri belarritako ederrak erosi ......
parent-detpl-E I-D earring beautiful- detpl bought
There is a third person plural absolutive phrase;
looking at
the paradigm, we
see that the corresponding morpheme is d and then
the root follows, i, and the plural marker, zki.
There is a first person dative, and here we have to
decide which one of the two forms to select. We must
look to see whether the selection of ergative will
add morphemes after the dative or not. The ergative
phrase is a third person plural, so the morpheme to
select is te. Therefore, the dative form must be da.
The resulting form is:
(52)
gurasoek niri belarritako ederrak erosi dizkidate
parent-detpl-E I-D earring beautiful- detpl bought
it-have-pl-me-they
'(my) parents have bought me beautiful earrings'
And finally, let us consider another type of
paradigm that combines
absolutive and
ergative
agreement. These
paradigms are called NOR-NORK paradigms. We will
illustrate the present tense NOR-NORK in (53):
(53)
|
PERSON
NI
HI
HURA
GU
ZU
ZUEK
HAIEK
|
NOR
NA
HA
D
GA IT
ZA IT
ZA IT
D IT |
ROOT
U
U
U
U
U
U ZTE
U |
NORK
T
K/N
-
GU
ZU
ZUE
TE |
Let us get some practice with
this paradigm:
suppose you wanted to say something like 'Miren sees
Patxi'. Since this is a transitive sentence, it
involves an ergative phrase Mirenek, and an
absolutive phrase Patxi. There is the main verb ikus
to which we attach the imperfective marker ten,
resulting in ikusten. Now we are ready to figure out
the auxiliary verb: it combines a third person NOR,
so the morpheme we need is d, then comes the root
which is u, and then it combines a third person NORK,
so the morpheme we need is a zero. The resulting
auxiliary verb is du. The sentence we wanted to say
is 'Mirenek Patxi ikusten du'.
If you consider
this paradigm, you will see that there is
a zte morpheme follosing the root. This morpheme
distinguishes auxiliary verbs that have a second
person singular absolutive from forms that have a
second person plural absolutive. The morpheme is
only used when the auxiliary reflects agreement with
a second person plural. For instance, take the
sentence 'Miren sees you guys'. Think about it...
Yes! The answer is correct. This sentence in Euskara
is 'Mirenek zuek ikusten zaituzte'.
As you see, the way to construct inflected verbs in
Euskara is rather simple: it involves putting pieces
together, one after the other in a fixed order.
There are few instances where the order of the
elements is altered, typically in forms involving
third person
absolutive phrases and past tense or modals. We will
discuss those instances in the following sections,
as we lay out the morphology of tenses and modals,
which is simpler than the
agreement
morphology, because it involves alternations of less
elements.
1.3. Tense. There are two tenses: past and present.
Past tense is manifest in the verbal inflection by
means of the morpheme n at the end of the inflected
form. Present tense is a zero morpheme, as
illustrated in
the paradigms
above. The presence of past tense alters the shape
of the initial material of the verbal root, and it
can also alter the order of morphemes, as we will
see in
1.3.1.
Let us take some of the verbal paradigms we have
already discussed and see what they look like when
they are inflected for past tense.
Consider the paradigm of the verb izan 'to be',
involving only absolutive agreement. In
(40), it was
inflected for present tense. In (54) below, the past
tense forms are illustrated:
(54)
|
PERSON
NI
HI
HURA
GU
ZU
ZUEK
HAIEK |
NOR
Nin
Hin
Z
Gin
Zin
Zin
Zi |
ROOT TENSE
TZE N
TZE N
E N
E N
E N
E TE N
RE N |
|
|
|
|
Comparing
(40) and (54) you
find the following differences: in the column
corresponding to the absolutive agreement (NOR), the
marker for third person has changed from d to z.
Present tense forms have d for third person
absolutive, while past tense forms have z for third
person absolutive. The vowel a that appeared in all
other person morphemes has now changed into in.
Concerning the root of izan 'to be', there have been
changes as well. At the end of the form appears the
past tense morpheme n.
Consider next a verbal paradigm containing
absolutive and dative agreement, that is, a NOR-NORI
paradigm. In
(41), the present
tense forms were illustrated, and
(55) below
illustrates the past tense paradigm:
(55)
|
PERSON
NI
HI
HURA
GU
ZU
ZUEK
HAIEK
|
NOR
Nin
Hin
Zi
Gin
Zin
Zin
Zi |
ROOT
TZAI
TZAI
TZAI
TZAI
TZAI
TZAI
TZAI
|
ZKI
ZKI
ZKI
ZKI |
NORI
DA
A/NA
O
GU
ZU
ZUE
E |
TENSE
N
N
N
N
N
TE N
N |
As you can see by comparing
(55) and
(41), the absolutive agreement changes a
little in the presence of past tense. In the NORI
(dative) column, we have chosen to illustrate the
markers da and a, na for first and second familiar
persons.
Recall that this is the form those
agreement morphemes take when something else follows
them in the auxiliary, as it is the case in past
tense forms, where the final n is required to
indicate past tense.
1.3.1.Past tense and ergative agreement. We can now
consider past tense paradigms where there are
ergative (NORK) agreement markers. In these
paradigms, some forms present a different order of
agreement morphemes. Let us first consider the forms
where there is no morpheme-order alterations. In
(56) below, you can see the overall NOR-NORK past
tense paradigm. That is, the paradigm of forms
containing NOR (absolutive) and NORK (ergative)
agreement markers and past tense:
(56)
|
PERSON
NI
HI
HURA
GU
ZU
ZUEK
HAIEK |
NOR
Nind
Hind
{}
Gint
Zint
Zint
{} |
ROOT
U
U
U
U
U ZTE
|
NORK
DA
A/NA
-
GU
ZU
ZUE
TE |
TENSE
N
N
N
N
| | 
