Two more verbs seem to have an Action correlating effect as final verb of chains: xøø ‘change’ and too/snv ‘follow’. Together with rvøøœ ‘ask,’ yhey are to a certain extent complementary activities in dialogue situation. We shall first treat xøø ‘change’ and rvøøœ ‘ask’, then too/snv ‘follow’, before examining a last chain with xøø ‘change’ in a somewhat different context.
xøø ‘change’ is a fairly polysemous verb, but its basic meaning seems to be ‘change location’. In dialogues it is often used to refer to one participant’s answering the other, the ‘change of location’ is extended by the idea of ‘change of the speaking locus’ to mean ‘answer’. A dialogue scene with questions and answers is clearly coactive. We have one such chain in our corpus.
55) PP V1 V2
“…. to exchange speechs with the chief.”
txt5:007
Ex 55) is the purpose-clause continuation of a sentence cited as ex 7), of villagers taking two visitors to their chief. The ensuing dialogue session is by 55) not conceptualized as involving the ‘giving’ of information to a receiver, but as to talk in answering the chief. This is seen in the use xøø ‘change’ as V2 –verb rather than mh ‘give’. The V1 –verb mxhm ‘talk’ occurs elsewhere with mh ‘give’, and so it is not this verbs that demands the presence of xøø ‘change’. Instead this chain is another example of how a conceptualization of a complex event may govern the choice of verbs. By the choice of verbs, it also governs the choice of grammatical relations: Though other utterance verbs in chains take an indirect object with Recipient role, there is no such object here. Instead the dialogue partner is expressed in the oblique prepositional phrase vtæ v`»m ‘with the chief’, the preposition expressing comitative. Still, this PP represents the second Agency of the Action correlating scene, as in the comparable English sentence I talked with him, which normally will be interpreted as having both participants engaged in talking.
Ô vtæ v`»m mxhm xøøjhqdÅ- Ô vtæ v`Ñm mxhm xøø,jh,qdÅ
… with chief speak change-TOT-v.detr
As rvøøœ ‘ask’, xøø ‘change’ pertain to the dialogue situation. As we remember, rvøøœ ‘ask’ did not co-occur with mh ‘give’ either. A dialogue situation of this kind thus seems to be conceptualized as different from the ‘communicating and listening’ situation we treated above. We will propose
‘response’ as a relevant type of Action correlating here, as an action that is complementary to ‘asking’.
Formal version: [the Agents PUT their Action IN-RESPONSE-TO the Agency’s ASKING]
CONSTITUTED-BY [the Agents spoke]
rvøøœ ‘ask’ on the other hand, though occurring 6 times in simplexes, occurs only once in a chain and then as V1 –verb. It thus conflates within itself both the notion of being in a dialogue situation with a partner and of speaking in a certain mode (i.e. to ask for information), and so does not need an extra utterance verb to act as co-event in the dialogue situation.
The chain in which rvøøœ ‘ask’ occurs in co-event position is interesting, though. It is presented in 56).
56) Sem V1 V2 O :RelS [V1 ] E`ál …t∆t∆ rvøøœ snv,vt xdæœv oÕ◊mvtæm`»- uncle hare ask follow-pst thing do-pst-pcpl
txt2:013
Formal version: [the Agent PUT his Action IN-FOLLOWING-OF Agency’s ANSWERING]
CONSTITUTED-BY [the Agent asks]
57) V1 V2 ADVL sbn Sag V1 cm
separate change-TOT-PF with death since hyenaDF talk -past CIT
“Then having been separated with death, the hyena spoke saying…”
E`ál …t∆t∆ rvøøœ snvvt xdæœv oÕ◊mvtæm`»-
“Uncle Hare asked what exactly had happened.”
The relative clause of 56), xdæœv oÕ◊mvtæm`» ‘thing done’, refers to events that had taken place before the speaker’s entering on the scene. He therefore wants to know what has lead to the present state of affairs (a pitched battle between the two other participants present). The chain used to express his asking employs rvøøœ ‘ask’ in co-event position and then has the verb snv ‘follow’ in framing event position. In V2 position snv ‘follow’ may also be used with other utterance verbs like jo`æœ .jo`æ`æœ
‘tell’, and then denotes a telling which renders a course of events chronologically. Postulating a similar meaning for its use here, it depicts the asking as being carried out with several questions along the lines of: What happened first? And then? And then?
Such repeated asking could of course be taken at face value, as a Temporal contouring event.
But the meaning of snv ‘follow’ also opens for a coactivity reading, since ‘follow’ intrinsically points to some other entity moving as well. In this setting, however, it denotes neither a following in space nor a “following” in time, but rather a “following” of the events of a sequential narrative. We accordingly take it to belong to the dialogue situation, where the ‘follow-up questions’ of the Agent unravel a story from the Agency’s telling. The Action correlating type of ‘response’ for the Agency’s action fits well with the present use with rvøøœ ‘ask’ here, but is less apt with the counterpart use with jo`æœ .jo`æ`æœ ‘tell’. We consequently propose ‘follow’ as type, and let the co-event be decided by the nature of the Agency’s action as ground entity.
We undertake to analyse a last chain with xøø ‘change’ before leaving Action correlating. The subject of the clause is elliptical, but it probably has a patientive role in the context (cfr the preceding sentence in ex 11) above).
Xdf xøøjhqh vtæ bv`æ`æ knÑ+ m`¿l∆ jo`æ`æœm`æ `∆ Ô xdf xøø,jh,qh vtæ bv`æ`æ knÑ m`¿l,K jo`æ`æœ,m`æ `¿ Ô
txt2:010
This example is at first sight built on the same structure as 55) above, i.e. V1 - V2 [xøø] - PP [vtæ +N]
(only inverted in 55), since it was a subordinated sentence governed by a ‘modal’ construction). But do we have an Action correlating event here? Some differences with 55) are as striking as the similarities: V1 is not an utterance verb, it denotes the separation of two entities, and it is therefore rather a motion or a state change verb. The noun of the PP, ‘death’, is not animate, though the comitative vtæ preposition is used. The effect of the two verbs are ablativic, with the subject
“moving” away from death as the ground entity. And the subject is not clearly agentive, making it difficult to use the formalism introduced by Talmy for this framing event.
One possibility is to classify this chain as having a State change framing event, thus expressing a
‘change from a state of immediate danger of dying’ to a ‘state of considerably less immediate danger of dying’.
We have found 20 instances with Action correlating as framing event in the corpus.59 Different situations with an inherent coactivity were found to express this linguistically by means of V2-verbs denoting comitative and dative, thus framing the events as Action correlating. The framing verbs discussed were x√æ√æœ ‘be.together’, ni ‘give’, too/snv ‘follow’ and xøø ‘change’. In the context of the dialogue situation rvøøœ ‘ask’ was also discussed.
The notion from Talmy of verb-framed languages as possibly allowing only identical activities in an Action correlating set-up, was shown to be incorrect for Nizaa. Nizaa seem to allow an even higher degree of difference between the correlated events than Talmy’s sample of languages.
Table B –4 in the appendix B shows all the chains found to have an Action correlating event in the corpus.
However, the clause intuitively is similar to coactivity, inviting such free translations as “Escaped from his brush with death, ….” We propose therefore that this is a metaphorical use of the Action correlating schema, mapping animacy, or capability of intentional action, over from the second Agency in Action correlating instances, to the second ‘Agency’ here, thus personifying the concept of death to some degree. The subject has ‘responded’ to Death by fleeing, or more precisely, by acting so as to be removed from it. The formal version given below is built on these ideas of a metaphorical mapping from change of state, to an Action correlating reading.
Formal version: [the Agent PUT his action IN-RESPONSE-TO the Agency’s MALEVOLENT PRESENCE] CONSTITUTED-BY [the Agent “moved away”]