{"id":1766,"date":"2023-05-14T21:06:28","date_gmt":"2023-05-15T01:06:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1766"},"modified":"2023-05-31T15:15:17","modified_gmt":"2023-05-31T19:15:17","slug":"defectivity-amharic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/defectivity-amharic\/","title":{"rendered":"Defectivity in Amharic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[This is part of a series of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/category\/language\/defectivity\/\">defectivity case studies<\/a>.]<\/p>\n<p>According to Sande (2015), only Amharic verb stems that contain a geminate can form a\u00a0<em>frequentative<\/em>. Since not all imperfect aspect verbs have geminates, some lack frequentatives and speakers must resort to periphrasis. If I understand the data correctly, it appears that the frequentative is a \/Ca-\/ reduplicant template which docks to the immediate left of the first geminate; the C (consonant) slot takes its value from said geminate. For instance, for the perfect verb [\u02c8s\u00e4<strong>b.b<\/strong>\u00e4r\u00e4] &#8216;he broke&#8217;, the frequentative is [s\u00e4.\u02c8<u>ba<\/u><strong>b.b<\/strong>\u00e4r\u00e4] &#8216;he broke repeatedly&#8217;. But there is no corresponding frequentative for the imperfective verb [\u02c8j\u0259.s\u00e4b(\u0259)r] &#8216;he breaks&#8217; since there is no geminate to dock the reduplicant against; Sande marks as ungrammatical *[j\u0259.s\u00e4.\u02c8<u>ba<\/u>b(\u0259)r] and presumably other options are out too.<\/p>\n<p>(h\/t: Heather Newell)<\/p>\n<h1>References<\/h1>\n<p>Sande, H. 2015. Amharic infixing reduplication: support for a stratal approach to morphophonology. Talk presented at NELS 46.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[This is part of a series of\u00a0defectivity case studies.] According to Sande (2015), only Amharic verb stems that contain a geminate can form a\u00a0frequentative. Since not all imperfect aspect verbs have geminates, some lack frequentatives and speakers must resort to periphrasis. If I understand the data correctly, it appears that the frequentative is a \/Ca-\/ &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/defectivity-amharic\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Defectivity in Amharic&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-defectivity","category-language","category-phonology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1766"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1781,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766\/revisions\/1781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}