Misconstruing The Rank Of Function Structures

Fawcett (2010: 227):

I should make it clear that the more complex grammatical morphologies of agglutinating languages — such as Japanese, Mohawk and Swahili — are also explicitly provided for in the theory, as also are inflectional languages. Indeed, in such languages morphemes function as direct elements of the clause. Consider the case of the Swahili expression alimwona. From the viewpoint of English alimwona appears to be a single word (and would probably be classed as a verb). Orthographically, of course, it is indeed a single word. Yet this 'word' expresses a rich series of meanings associated with an 'event', including the Process, the Participants in the Process, and the Time of the event. In a morpheme-by-morpheme translation, its meaning is roughly 'he/she + past + him/her + see', i.e., 'he/she saw him/her'. In other words, it contains elements that correspond roughly to the English clause elements of Subject, Auxiliary, Complement and Main Verb (though it should not be assumed that these would be appropriate names for the elements in Swahili). In a description of Swahili that uses the present theory of syntax, then, morphemes (here a, li, mu and ona) would be treated as expounding directly the elements of the clause.

 

Blogger Comments:

This is misleading. To be clear, on this description of Swahili, these functions are operating at the rank of word, which is why they are realised by morphemes, the units of the rank below the rank of word. Fawcett has simply made the false assumption that what are construed as clause rank functions in English are also construed as clause rank functions in Swahili.