Les langues offrent une multitude d’elements linguistiques pour organiser et delivrer les informations (Jisa, Reilly, Verhoeven, Baruch & Rosado, 2002). Il y a plusieurs manieres d’exprimer en mot la representation mentale des evenements. Le locuteur, en fonction des outils linguistiques dont il dispose, choisit les formes qui lui apportent le plus de valeur communicative pour transmettre son message.Notre etude est centree sur deux connecteurs de l’amharique, -mm et dammo, qui sont abondants dans la langue, et dans la narration en particulier. Nous avons pour objectif d’examiner, dans une perspective developpementale, comment les locuteurs les utilisent, et les fonctions que ces particules ont dans leurs narrations. Nous cherchons a distinguer les fonctions communicatives ou pragmatiques qui sont signalees dans l’enonce au moyen de ces marques. Pour ce faire, nous avons constitue un corpus de soixante productions narratives d’enfants de groupes d’âges differents (5-6, 7-8 et 10-12 ans) et d’adultes locuteurs d’amharique. Nous avons utilise le support image sans texte « Frog, where are you? » (Mayer, 1969) pour recueillir nos donnees. Ce materiel experimental a deja servi a de nombreuses etudes developpementales dans plusieurs langues (Bamberg, 1987 ; Kail & Hickmann, 1992 ; Berman & Slobin, 1994 ; Kern 1997 ; Akinci, 1999 ; Stromqvist V Jisa, Chenu, Fekete & Omar, 2010 ; Fekete, 2011, Saidi 2014 entre autres).Les resultats montrent que le clitique -mm et la locution dammo, bien qu’ils soient tous les deux employes par tous les locuteurs, n’ont pas toujours la meme portee selon le locuteur et varient en fonction de l’âge. dammo, marque principalement le theme contraste pour montrer la concomitance des evenements. Il s’avere etre plus maniable pour les enfants par rapport a –mm qui est beaucoup plus complexe, non seulement de par sa structure synthetique mais surtout parce qu’il est multiusage. –mm ancre l’information dans le contexte, il met en exergue le constituant sur lequel il opere.

https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01831991/document

Les marqueurs –mm et dämmo dans la narration en amharique : approche développementale

In this article we examine the enclitic -mm in Amharic and its claimed functions as topic marker and coordinative conjunction. The enclitic -mm has multiple translations into English, and would thus seem to constitute a multifunctional morpheme. In contrast to previous analyses, we argue that the several interpretations of enclitic -mm in discourse are due to different context-dependent readings of its single function, namely as contrastive focus marker.

The enclitic -mm in Amharic: reassessment of a multifunctional morpheme

In Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic Ambjorn Sjors describes the grammar of verbal negation in a wide selection of Semitic languages with an emphasis on the historical change of negative expressions.

Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic

This thesis investigates the syntactic features, functions, and diachrony of a complex predicate called ‘the inceptive construction’ which is based on a grammaticalised use of the converbs ‘get up’ ...

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The inceptive construction and associated topics in Amharic and related languages

The system of prepositions signifies the appearance of secondary analytical system in an inflectional agglutinative language. It is normally divided in two diachronic levels: primary and secondary. Both levels have a grammaticalized nominal origin. The primary level goes back, however, to similar lexical elements and semantic universals in all the semitic languages and it is even possible to find it in the Indo-European family. In this paper the implied grammaticalization process is analyzed

Grammaticalization, lexicalization, and semantic universals (the case of the primitive semitic prepositions)

Stimulated by Z. Harris's ‘Discourse analysis’ which raised the problem of continuing linguistic analysis in a particular connected discourse beyond the limits of a single sentence and by K. L. Pike's hints at the existence of a formal and semantic supra-sentence unit, such as the paragraph, American linguists produced some systematic and coherent descriptions of larger stretches of discourse, pointing towards certain grammatical, lexical, and stylistic relations reaching across sentence boundaries. Although most of these works deal with Amerindian languages, the method of analysis and the terminology they use can readily be applied to other languages, as was done, for instance in English, by V. Waterhouse in ‘Independent and dependent sentences’. This author draws a parallel between independent and dependent morphemes, phrases, and clauses on the one hand, and independent and dependent sentences, on the other, pointing out that ‘not all sentences are independent’ and that ‘there are in fact grammatical constructions which indicate that some sentences are dependent and therefore to be included in some larger linguistic form such as paragraph or discourse’.

Olga Kapeliuk

Papers

Particles of concatenation and of reference in Amharic