Valency classes in Eastern

Armenian

Bibliography
Daniel, M., Khurshudian, V. (n.d.). Valency classes in Eastern Armenian.

Fatima Olivas Villarreal

November 27 2018
About Eastern Armanian

It is an Indoeuropean language part of the Armanian branch.

The official language of the Republic of Armenia
Spoken by over three million people living there
Data obtention

• Data comes from the Eastern Armanian National Corpus

• Examples constructed based on the authors native knowledge
Structure of investigation

1. General Overview of Eastern Armenian Morphosyntax

2. Discussion of transitivity issues and the two transitivity changing
derivations: mediopassive and causative.
3. Unmarked alternations
4. Extended Valencies
5. Building on the data on case frames and alternations available
for specific verbs
 Grammatical Background

• Armenian nominal morphology is close to the agglutinative prototype

 with however some traces of flexion inherited from the Classical Armenian period.

• Verbal morphology is relatively rich but many forms are periphrastic, combining dependent forms with
the auxiliary.

• The clausal word order is flexible and determined by the communicative structure.

• Accusative alignment and a very clear differential object marking (DOM) pattern
dative is used for human direct objects (hDO)
nominative for inanimate direct objects (iDO)

• Non-human animate direct objects (aDO) behave inconsistently (are ambiguous): they take either
nominative or dative marking with no apparent change in meaning.
• The terms nominative and dative are used in the sense of case
marking rather than syntactic function.
• The term accusative is not at all used because there is no
dedicated case marking for DO.
• Armenian nouns only distinguish two core cases. Direct is the case
of S/A (subject) and iDO; oblique is the case of the noun in the
attributive position, hDO and Recipient.
• For the direct object marking the label DO will be used to cover
both dative and nominative marking for hDO, aDO and iDO when
these do not need to be differentiated
Transitivity and morphologically marked
valency alternations

• Eastern Armenian has two valency derivations marked on the verb:

mediopassive and causative.

Causative suffix: ‐chn-

‘Give’- causative pattern

• Mediopassive marker ‐v-
Possible meanings: passive, reflexive, reciprocal, decausative
Transitivizing or detransitivizing language

• Several arguments support classifying Eastern Armenian as more

detransitivizing than transitivizing.
1. In terms of text frequency, mediopassives are more than three times as
frequent as morphological causatives in the EANC.
2. One may compare primary intransitive and primary transitive meanings
 3.- Morphological causatives tend to combine with intransitive verbs and to express contact
causation. Both tendencies are not absolutely straightforward in Eastern Armenian.
• Armenian morphological causatives thus are not a fully prototypical representative of this
cross-linguistic category.
• Mediopassive and causative may combine in one wordform. In this case, the
mediopassive marker follows the causative marker
This suggests that, in terms of derivation, the causative is at least not less derivational
than the mediopassive marker, supporting the claim that Eastern Armenian mediopassive,
though a more recent acquisition, is a more grammatical device than the causative.
• The much more frequent situation being that medio- passive is formed from
transitive verbs, and causative from intransitive verbs to convey contact
causative meaning.
Unmarked Valency Alternations

• In addition to causative and mediopassive derivations, some verbs

show variation in argument marking that is not coded on the verb.
May be valency decreasing, valency rearranging, or ambiguous between the
two.
Valency increasing alterations are considered under extended valencies
• All alternations are semantically driven.
• May be directional or symmetrical
Directional: distinguishing between the primary and secondary valencies -
reciprocal and all extensions
Symmetrical: contentive-locative, proprietive and probably object omission
Reciprocal Alternation
• Involves a change from a bivalent (transitive or other) construction
to the intransitive construction with non-singular (plural or
coordinated) subject.
• It occurs with verbs belonging to different valency classes
provided that the situation may be considered symmetrical.
The activity can be covered by the same verbal lexeme
Object Omission

• Occurs with generalized objects with verbs that often move their
objects out of focus to highlight the process or event,
E.g., ‘eat’, ‘read’ or ‘swallow’.
• Other verbs that easily lose their DO are the verbs strongly
associated with one typical object.
E.g., ‘spit’ or ‘urinate’
Contentive-locative alternation

• It is characteristic of few verbs such as verbs of filling or loading and

reflects an alternative interpretation of a container as a Patient or a
Place, with a respective interpretation of the filler/load as an Instrument
or a Patient.
Proprietive Alternation

• Proprietive (ablative-genitive) alternation occurs with a few verbs that

designate taking something off the surface of an object or taking away
part of the object or someone’s possession.
May be viewed as a possessor or a source
Extended Valencies

• The main valency classes may be extended by additional arguments

which are secondary.
• The same extension may be optional, frequent or obligatory,
depending on the verb.
• Thus, in Armenian, animate Goal marking by a dative is optional with
verbs like ‘bring’ and obligatory with ‘give’
a special benefactive postposition hamar is used therefore it cannot be freely
used as an adjunct with other verbs.
• Provide a fuller frame of the situation in terms of the participant set.
• Valency classes formed by extensions are considered secondary
It is difficult to determine which verbs require an extension and which are
optional
Benefactive extension

• Occurs with verbs designating situations that allow one to

introduce an indirectly affected human participant.
• Ditransitive verbs are verbs for which this extension is obligatory.
• For the Beneficiaries that are less expected, a postpositional
phrase with hamar ‘for’ may be used.
 Spatial Extension

• Introduces a slot expressed by

Nominative- Goal
Locative- Place
 Ablative- Source
Postpositional phrase or dative - Place
or Goal
• Almost obligatory spatial slots with
motion verbs.
Instrumental extension

• Instrumental extension introduces an Instrument coded by

instrumental case.
• It is obligatory with verbs denoting processes typically carried out
with instruments, such as ‘cut’ or ‘dig’, although these may be
implicit when the object is typical for this process (knife, spade)
or out of focus.
Valency classes

• A valency class is a group of verbs whose similar morphosyntactic

behavior is motivated by a similar linguistic construal of the real world
situation and reflects participant sets that are perceived as similar.
• Transitivity is a macrofeature that divides Eastern Armenian verbs into
major groups but is not sufficiently semantically motivated to delineate
true valency classes.
• The reasons to introduce this scale instead of a binary opposition include
inconsistent behavior of some dual intransitive and semitransitive verbs,
which shows that the cardinality of the valency correlates with the
conventional notion of formal transitivity.
Weather verbs

• They take no arguments.

Intransitive verbs

• Intransitive verbs with one argument can typically be causativized

but cannot form a mediopassive.
• May be divided into several different valency classes
Motion verbs: easily take or are more typical with a spatial extension, but it is
not obligatory for any of them.
Sound production verbs: one argument verbs, but may optionally include a
postpositional Target
Plain internal states: do not have typical extensions
Dative verbs: Eastern Armenian shows that the interpretation of dative verbs
may not always be straightforward.
 verbs of contact - dative seems to inherit its allative Goal function
 more abstract verbs - dative second argument where this argument is by no means
agentive
Transitive Verbs

• Verbs that take a direct object and form a mediopassive

• Different classes
Semitransitive: verbs that take direct objects but do not form a mediopas-
sive, in Eastern Armenian, want and hide.
Ambitransitive: transitive verbs that are more often used without an
object, because it is either generalized or implicit.
True transitive: require a direct object and form a mediopassive
Experiential transitives: experiential and perception verbs are fully aligned
with the transitive pattern, taking Stimuli as DO and undergoing
mediopassive derivation.
 Caused motion verbs

• Caused motion verbs belong to the same valency class as intransitive motion
verbs above except that they introduce an Agent.

Removal verbs: proprietive alternation

Filling verbs: contentive-locative alternation

Creation verbs: optional use of the ablative

Transitive contact verbs | Verbs of speech

• Verbs of speech take as a

• Designate caused motion direct object noun phrases
events that result in designating the content of the
physical contact between speech act. They also
the Theme and the Goal. introduce a third participant,
Addressee, coded by dative.
Thank you