Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2008, Page 135

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The BÚNA-construction in Pidgin Icelandic
preverbal particle búnal& and the original items have entirely lost their
morphological and phonetic independence: the whole chain that,
depending on the person, has 4 or 5 syllables and consists of three
words (two of those include several morphemes) has been simplified
into a single bi-syllabic morpheme búna}9
4.2 Different conditions
The change from the original B-perfect into the BÚNA-construction
has the properties of generalization in the sense of Hopper and
18 The decategorialization affects the structural nature of a given construction,
and consequently, the elements that are heavier become lighter. This means that an
element that belongs to a major category like nouns, verbs or adjectives, becomes a
member of a minor category. In consequence, the element loses its semantic inde-
Pendence as well as its morphologic and syntactic properties wich could have identi-
fied it as the member of one of the abovementioned major categories (cf. Hopper and
Traugott 2003:107, Klausenburger 2000:75-77, and Heine 1993:55). During the de-
categorialization, verbs lose their verbal characteristics as indicators of tense, aspect,
mood and persons. For example, the verb étre ‘be’ in French as a part of the inter-
rogative word es-que que has entirely lost its verbal nature (cf. Detges and Waltereit
2008). Similarly, in some synthetic constructions in Modem French, the Latin auxil-
*ary habeo has been reduced to an affix. As affíx the verb habeo is no longer inflect-
ed for mood, tense or aspect — it is reduced to present (simple future) chanterai or to
past (conditional) morphology chanterais (cf. Schwegler 1990:132-133).
19 As mentioned above, in P1 the auxiliary verb vera 'be' has completely disap-
peared from this construction and the analytical sequence has been reduced to a
mono-morphemic particle búna. What is the status of this particle? Is it a pre-verbal
Particle, or should we rather understand it as being a verbal (aspectual or temporal)
Prefix? In other words, is the BÚNA-construction in PI still analytical (cf. (ia)) or
already synthetic (cf. (ib))?
(* *)a. É búna kaupa.
1 BÚNA buy(inf)
b- É búnakaupa.
I buy-BÚNA
Certainly, íúrther work must be done in order to answer this question. However, there
*s some evidence for the ongoing change from an analytic into a synthetic nature of
*he BÚNA-construction. The particle búna cannot be used independently with a lex-
*eal meaning. In order to say ‘finished’ or ‘done’ one would rather use the full adjec-
l*val form búin. In fact, the unit búna does not have any meaning of its own. On the
°ther hand, it has a grammatical function when it occurs together with a verb.