Download Pseudo-coordinative construction (jít)

Svatava Škodová
Technical university of Liberec
SCLA 2009 Prague
This proceeding was supported from an internal grant (IGS FP TUL 2009) of
Fakulty of Science, Humanities and Education, Technical University of
Liberec.
a
type of coordination that uses
coordinator and on the surface level for
connection of two verbs into a
construction V1aV2, without coordinating
two events
 The verb in the first position V1 can lose
its primary meaning
 meaning of the verb in the position V2 is
modified
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination , SCLA 2009
Jít/go – a/and – V2
A tak Petr šel a četl celou tu knihu.
And soPeter went and read the whole book.
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
Caesar
It
went and read the parchment!
went and rained
Thomas
Carlisle was very much impressed by
the work of people like Wordsworth and
Coleridge because they were just a bit before
him and he actually went and met Coleridge
(BNC, KGW 569)
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
1611 sentences
with the pattern jít-a-V2
ProKoor
923 examples
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
PseKoor
688 examples
 Swedish
- Gunlög, 1991; Wiklund, 2005;
Darnell, 2008,
 Norwegian - Lødrup, 2002,
 English - Carden – Pesetzky, 1997,
Grootjen- Kamphuis – Sarbo,
1999; Quirk, 2000; Wulff , 2004;
de Vos, 2005; de Vos, 2007).
 Russian – Kuznetsova, 2006
 Czech – Škodová, 2009
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
1. major uses of jít – a –V2
2. uses of PseKoor Jít-a-2V - motivated by a
combination of the image schematic
properties of the verb jít and the more
richly specified semantics of V2
3. the precise nature of this mechanism: the
image-schematic properties evoked by jít
blended with the event structure of the V2 to
allow the speaker to construe the event
denoted by the second verb in accordance
with the image-schematic meaning of jít.
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
 the
two verbs are not coordinated to create
a complex clause,
 they form a single syntactic unit similar to
analytical form of a verb
 Typically
there are described 4 semantic
fields concerning this construction:
1. speakers annoyance,
2. speakers surprise,
3. proceeding without hesitation,
4. actual motion.
S. Škodová Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009

a speaker expresses his annoyance about the event described by
V2
A jak to bylo všechno hloupé! Kuchařka to přece pozná -musí to poznat!
Jako bych
šel
a sám
si plivl
do obličeje.
as would.I go. PAST and myself spit. I PAST REFL to face
Jak je to jenom možné?
(And it was so silly! The cook will recognize it – she must recognize it!It
was as if I went and spitted to my own face. How is it possible? )
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009

a speaker expresses his surprise about an unexpected action
described by V2
Uhla zabil padesátkrát víc lidí ne tím nožíkem , ale tím , že je nakazil . A
když tu nemoc rozesel všude kolem ,
šel
a
sám
na ni umřel . "
go. HE PAST and himself of it die. HE PAST
(Uhla killed fifty times more people not by the little knife, but by the
infection. And when he had spread the illness all around he went
and died of it himself.“)
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009

speaker expresses that the action was fulfilled without hesitating
and thinking about any obstacles and difficulties connected with
the event
(…) dal nám knihu a řekl : " Je to nejhezčí kniha na světě . Čtěte ji ,
uchovejte si ji . "
Šly
jsme
a
četly
jsme .
go. WE PAST be. WE PAST and read. WE PAST
be.WE PAST
Matka však zuřila .
(…) he gave us a book and said: „This is the most beautiful book in the
world. Read it, protect it. And we went and read . But our mother was
furious.
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009

using the jít-a-V2 construction, it is possible to express as dynamic
also those events that are in its own nature static, the verb jít/go
postures its own dynamic capacity to the event of V2, which we can
accept as dynamic.
" Bylo by fajn , kdyby nám tu zase brečelo nějaké dítě , " podotkl někdo z
rodiny ,
a tak šli
a opatřili
si
dítě
and so go. THEY PAST and equip. THEY PAST themselves. PARTICLE REFL a baby
ze St . Cloud's .
from St. Cloud´s .
(“It would be nice to have a crying baby around again,” some member
of a family said, and so they went and equipped themselves by a
baby from St. Cloud´s.)
S. Škodová:

In Czech the jít-a-V2 construction is very frequent in the
imperative form, again the verb jít/go is semantically bleached
here and its function is the one of urgent entreaty or command.
Hovořila se mnou - vyprávěla mi o mém bratru Markovi –
a
pak mi řekla,
abych šel a běžel
závod.
and then me say. SHE PAST, to. I KOND go and run
the race.
(She was talking to me – telling me about my brother Mark – and then
she told me to go and run the race.)
S. Škodová:
- the jít-a-V2 construction exhibit some semantic
regularities
that are rather surprising
if one assumes that jít/go means “jít/go”
or nothing at all (if considered to be a semantically
empty auxiliary)
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009

Another meaning associated with the pseudo-coordination of jít in
Czech but not in English is the meaning of “activity in progress for
an extended period of time”. In English this meaning does not
join pseudo-coordination of go, because English own special
syntactic construction expressing this quality of the time duration
of event.
Nechtějí se organizovat .
Lidi
se
dřív
dali
dohromady ,
people PARTICL.REFL. In the past give. THEY PAST together,
šli
a
pomáhali
si .
go.THEY PAST and
help. THEY PAST
one another. PART REFL.
Svépomocí pro sebe mnohé udělali .
They do not want to be organized. In the past people joined one
another, they were helping one another. They did many things by
themselves.
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
 jít/go
is not used in arbitrary ways
 There
is systematicity in using the
construction
 this
systematicity is related to the
meaning of the verb jít/go
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
……………………………………………….
TR
LM
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
….…
…….
…….
TR
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
LM
….…
…….
………… .…….
TR
LM
S. Škodová:
TR
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
LM
1. “actual motion” is the basic meaning of all schemas in Figures 1-4;
that is the reason, why we do not consider jít to be a semantically
empty auxiliary.
2. meanings like “continuous action” and “progressive aspect” more
generally can be accounted for in terms of a metaphorical
extension of the schema in Figure 2 from “motion over an extended
period of time” to “action over an extended period of time” in Czech
language this is combined with the aspectual characteristics of V2 to
encode a progress of an event to its right boundary.
3. meanings like “surprise” and “unexpectedness” result from the
same metaphorical extension applied to the schema in Figure 3.
Here, the expected conceptual path corresponds to the expected
flow of, and the divergence from the path corresponds to an
unexpected event;
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
4. meanings like “annoyance”, “disappointment”, “disapproval”,
or “evaluation of an action as silly” are also accounted for by
the schema in Figure 3, with the difference that the expected
conceptual path corresponds to the kind of actions that the
speaker considers desirable or rational, and the divergence
from this path corresponds to an event that is not desirable
or rational from the speaker´s perspective.
5. meanings like “proceeding without hesitation”, “paying no attention
to obstacles” can be counted for in terms of the same metaphorical
extension as before, this time applied to the schema in Figure 4,
where the obstacles correspond to potential reasons not to act in a
certain way.
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009

Pseudokoordinations using jít-a-V2 are motivated by aspects
of conceptual structure
There is the incorporation of the image-schematic structure of
jít into the event structure of the V2.



the main verb encodes some event structure
jít encodes some construal structure in accordance with its
image schematic meaning,
a coordinating conjunction encodes the blending of the two.
S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009
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