Some Developments in the Functional Architecture of the Kannada Clause

The Kannada clause raises interesting questions from a synchronic as well as diachronic perspective. In earlier work (Amritavalli 2000), beginning with the puzzle of how tense was interpreted in negative sentences instantiating the ‘matrix infinitive’ and the ‘matrix gerund,’ I proposed that the finiteness feature of the Kannada clause resides in a Mood Phrase that hosts one of the heads agr (Indicative mood), neg, or modal. The category tense, now divested of finiteness, i.e. its function of “anchoring the sentence in time,” is consequently subsumable under that of temporal aspect in this language. Each of the heads of the Mood Phrase is seen to select an Aspect Phrase complement, some apparently finite in containing morphemes standardly taken to be ‘tense,’ now reanalyzed as temporal aspect; and some obviously nonfinite, i.e. the ‘matrix infinitive/gerund’. The postulation of a Mood Phrase with a finiteness feature thus allows us to analyze a variety of superficial clause-types in Kannada in terms of a single underlying clause structure. This work is summarized in section 2.

In section 3 of this paper, I argue that the Mood P is a relatively new functional projection in the language. An older functional projection hosting agr, which was the sole marker of finiteness, looks to have yielded ground to a new projection of Mood which allows finiteness to be marked by the neg and modal elements in addition to agr. Simultaneously, a new functional projection or projections have evolved of temporal Aspect; and this is perhaps the first step in the evolution of a category of Tense in the language. These changes in the functional architecture of the clause are invoked to explain a variety of changes in the distributional facts concerning the cooccurrence of agreement with negation, agreement with modality, and negation with an interpretation of tense, in the history of Kannada. At a prior stage of the language, which had a ‘negative conjugation’ and a ‘contingent future tense’, markers for negation, temporal aspect and modality occur in a single, undifferentiated position in the clause. Negation does not permit temporal specification, and negation cooccurs with agreement. In the current language, both these facts are reversed.

Our account of the differentiation of the features of negation and temporal aspect, and their evolution into separate functional projections, allows us to strengthen Grimshaw’s (1991) proposal of extended projections with an interesting detail. The original proposal that functional projections share categorial features with related lexical projections does not address the question why this should be so; nor does it give a rationale, other than an observational one, for the identification of particular lexical and functional categories as categorially related. We argue the functional elements in the extended projection of a lexical category to literally originate in the lexical category, at a functional level of zero. It is lexical features that “migrate” or reinstantiate themselves in functional projections in the XP. In particular, the Kannada facts suggest that the feature content of heads of individual functional projections in the clause for negation, temporality and modality has its counterpart not only in the lexical aspectual features of a verb as an integral part of its meaning, but also in isolable morphemes with corresponding meanings which nevertheless lack individual clausal, functionally differentiated positions of their own.

Section 4 of the paper elaborates the clause structure developed in the preceding two sections by taking into account nonfinite negation in the matrix clause, and the occurrence of temporal aspect on “dummy verbs.” This structure is also seen to accommodate the semi-lexical auxiliary and the serial verb constructions in the language.