Martine Robbeets - Diachrony of Verb Morphology

Martine Robbeets

Diachrony of Verb Morphology

ISBN 978-3-11-037823-8
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-039994-3
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-040011-3
ISSN 1861-4302

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet http://dnb.dnb.de .

2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Typesetting: Frank Benno Junghanns, Berlin

www.degruyter.com

__

Fr Lars

This book took me ten years, much longer than I had initially expected. I can still vividly remember the day that I decided to start writing. It was early November 2004, one of these enchanting days of Japanese fall. Deep-blue sky, a splendid view on mount Fuji, the Ginkgo trees on campus wearing autumn colors. Tooru Hayashi had organized a conference on Diversity in Data and Description in Peripheral Eurasian Languages at the University of Tokyo, where I was doing postdoctoral research at that time. At the pre-conference dinner in a tempura restaurant near Akamon, the red entrance gate of the university, I was introduced to Lars Johanson. It was stimulating to hear that Lars had read my doctoral dissertation dealing with lexical evidence relating Japanese to the Altaic languages. Thought-provoking, he challenged me: but shared verb morphology would convince me more. And so a new research topic was born.

In the following ten years, I have been trying to build a case for common Transeurasian verb morphology, discussing my ideas with Lars, who agrees on some issues, but disagrees on others. I felt privileged to base my research at the universities of Mainz and Leuven, where I was hosted by scholars, who inspired and supported me: Lars Johanson, Hubert Cuyckens and Walter Bisang. I wholeheartedly thank my hosts for their professional guidance. The realization of my research in Europe was financially supported by various grants and research fellowships. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation first created the resources for a two-year research stay at the Seminar fr Orientkunde at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, hosted by Lars Johanson. Then a Back to Belgium return mandate from the Belgian Federal Government allowed me to continue my research between 2009 and 2011 at the University of Leuven, where I collaborated with Hubert Cuyckens. Finally, with the support of Walter Bisang, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft funded a three-year research project on the Transeurasian languages at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. I am grateful to the Canon Europe Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Av Humboldt Foundation, the Belgian Federal Government and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for providing me with challenging research opportunities.

Due to their generous financial support, we were also able to organize four symposia dealing with central thematic issues such as the relevance of verb morphology in affiliation questions, the distinction between borrowing and inheritance in shared morphology, shared grammaticalization and the historical development of paradigms. These symposia resulted in the edition of four volumes: Transeurasian Verbal Morphology in a Comparative Perspective: Genealogy, Contact, Chance, edited with Lars Johanson in 2010 (Harrassowitz), Copies versus Cognates in Bound Morphology, edited with Lars Johanson in 2012 (Brill), Shared Grammaticalization, edited with Hubert Cuyckens in 2013 (Benjamins) and Paradigm Change. The Transeurasian Languages and Beyond, edited with Walter Bisang in 2014 (Benjamins). My gratitude goes to the collaborators who contributed their ideas to these projects, at the same time inspiring and supporting me in the process of writing this book: Alexandra Aikhenvald, Anton Antonov, Ad Backus, Dik Bakker, Peter Bakker, Walter Bisang, Hendrik Boeschoten, Bernard Comrie, Greville Corbett, va Csat, Stig Eliasson, Victor Friedman, Francesco Gardani, Volker Gast, Anthony Grant, Tom Gldeman, Salom Gutirrez-Morales, Tooru Hayasi, Bernd Heine, Juha Janhunen, Lars Johanson, Andrew Joseph, Brian Joseph, Judith Josephson, Folke Josephson, Lszl Kroly, Seongyeon Ko, Frederik Kortlandt, Andrej Malchukov, Heiko Narrog, Irina Nevskaya, Johanna Nichols, Motoki Nomachi, Hans Nugteren, Brigitte Pakendorf, Seongha Rhee, Andrs Rna-Tas, Claudia Rmer, Laurent Sagart, Frank Seifart, Nikki van de Pol, Johan van der Auwera, George van Driem, Jim Unger, JeanChristophe Verstraete and Lindsay Whaley.

A heartfelt word of thanks also goes to Milan van Berlo at the University of Leiden and Kristin Blanpain at the University of Leuven for their dedicated assistance in formatting and English editing, respectively. I would also like to thank editor Volker Gast and co-editor Heiko Narrog of the Trends in Linguistics/Studies and Monographs series for their enthusiasm in including this work in the series. Finally, I wish to thank Acquisitions Editor Birgit Sievert at Mouton de Gruyter for her initial interest and for her help and encouragement in seeing this project through.

To my seven years old son Yasu I apologize for being such a bookish mom, who is not always at home when you need her. At the same time I thank my husband Marc for making up for that by being an amazingly cool dad. Love you, boys.

Maaseik
February 14, 2015