Roots and verbs in North Saami

• Main Author: Julien, Marit
• Other Authors: Toivonen, Ida, Nelson, Diane
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: John Benjamins Publishing Company 2007
• Subjects: Languages and Literature; lexical category; North Saami; roots; denominal verbs; derived verbs; deadjectival verbs; saami
• Online Access: https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/586384

Although it has been argued lately that roots have no lexical category, a close look at deadjectival and denominal verbs in North Saami reveals that roots nevertheless differ with respect to their semantic type, and that this semantic contrast between roots leads to systematic syntactic and semantic differences between derived verbs. More specifically, state-denoting (‘adjectival’) roots can combine directly with a verbalizer, yielding verbs that mean ‘be Root’, ‘become Root’ or ‘cause to be Root’. Entity-denoting roots, on the other hand, must combine with a (possibly abstract) preposition before the verbalizer is merged, and because of the obligatory presence of the preposition, the result is a verb that means ‘have Root’, ‘get Root’ or ‘cause to have Root’. Hence, it is not the case that any root can appear in just any syntactic environment.