Article
Culminating and non-culminating accomplishments in Malagasy
Linguistics
(2020)
Abstract
Malagasy is a language with non-culminating accomplishments. There is, however, a specific prefix (maha-), which appears to entail culmination. Moreover, verbs prefixed with maha- display a range of interpretations: causative, abilitive, ‘manage to’, and unintentionality. This paper accounts for these two aspects of this prefix with a unified semantic analysis. In particular, maha- encodes double prevention. The double prevention configuration is associated with a cir- cumstantial modal base, which leads to culminating readings in the past and future, but not the present tense. The embedding of double prevention in a force- theoretic framework leads to a more fine-grained theory of causation, which the Malagasy data show to have empirical relevance.
Keywords
- causation,
- ability,
- culmination
Disciplines
Publication Date
2020
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0184
Citation Information
Ileana Paul, Henriëtte de Swart and Baholisoa Simone Ralalaoherivony. "Culminating and non-culminating accomplishments in Malagasy" Linguistics Vol. 58 Iss. 5 (2020) p. 1285 - 1322 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ileanapaul/63/