Gram - SEAS

5.3 Decategorialization I I I
postpositions (and, still further back, to nouns). In Hungarian the suffix -ball, as
in luizball 'house-inessive/in the house,' was once the locative case of a relational
noun meaning 'interior.' Similarly, the elative, meaning 'away from,' as in hazbol
'from the house,' shows a suffix -bol that goes back to a different case of the same
word. The final 1111 segments of the two suffixes are themselves relics of the two
case endi ngs on the relational noun (Comrie 1981: I 19).
The Hungarian suffixes -ban and -bol are examples of agglutinative suffixes:
they are joined to the stem with a minimum of phonological adjustments, and the
boundary between stem and sutTix is quite obvious. By contrast, fusional affixes
show a blurring not only of the stem/affix boundary, but also of the boundaries
among the affixes themselves. In Latin militibus 'to/from the soldiers,' -ibm; is
a dative/ablative plural suffix which cannot be further analyzed, and in miles
'soldier:NOM:SG' the -t- of the stem *milet has been lost through assimilation
to the nominative singular suffix -so
5.3.2 A verb-ta-affix cline
A parallel cline has a lexical verb as its starting point which develops into
an auxiliary and eventually an affix (verbal clines have been the subject of several
cross-linguistic studies, most notably Bybee 1985; Bybee and Dahl 1989). There
are a number of points on this cline which can be characterized as follows:
fu ll verb >
auxiliary >
verbal c1itic >
verbal affix
On this cline, we typically find that verbs having a fu ll lexical meaning and a
grammatical status as the only verb in their clause come to be used as auxiliaries to
another verb. Auxiliary verbs typically have semantic properties of tense, aspect
or mood, and show specialized syntactic behavior (e.g., in POE, auxiliary will
cannot occur in certain temporal and infinitival clauses; hence the following are
ungrammatical: * Let's wait till she will join us, */ would like her to will joill us).
There are numerous examples of the shift from main to auxiliary verb. From POE
we have cited go in be going to. Other examples include have, which is a fu ll verb
in have a book, but a partial, or "quasi-auxiliary" in have a book to read and
have to read a book, and a fu ll auxiliary in have had a book (here auxiliary have
precedes main verb have in its past-participial form). Another example is keep,
wh ich is a fu ll lexical verb in she keeps indoors on cold days, but an auxiliary in
she keeps watering the tomatoes. Auxiliaries may historically become c1itics, like
English have in we 've built a new garage. And such c1itics may become affixes. As