Divergence of Form and Meaning in Comparative Perspective

A striking characteristic of human language is the unexpected prevalence of grammatical similarities between unrelated languages. The study of these similarities and implicational relationships between them sheds light on the universal core of human language grammar and therefore on the foundations of the human capacity for language. This research project contributes to this endeavor by investigating a cluster of semantic similarities in English and Arabic verb phrases and their adjectival derivatives (participles). Similar semantic features are expressed in partially different morphological and syntactic forms in the two languages. The investigation of these dissimilarities in form allows us to separate fundamental from accidental correspondences between form and meaning in the two languages and isolate potential universals in this area. This research project focuses on the cluster of semantic properties expressed by the perfect construction in English and the related passive construction. The English perfect is expressed by the auxiliary have in combination with the same form of the verb that occurs in the passive, though it displays the active syntactic frame. The meaning of the perfect is expressed in Arabic by the active participle in combination with the auxiliary corresponding to English be. In combination with be, the English passive participle is ambiguous between a verbal and adjectival passive. In Arabic, the passive participle expresses only the adjectival passive, while the function of the verbal passive is performed by a dedicated finite verb form. Hence, the same semantic features are allotted to different morphosyntactic formats in English and Arabic, and the comparative examination of these constructions promises to reveal which aspects of the form-meaning correspondence are critical to the expression of these semantic features and which are contingent. Comparative research on the relationship between form and meaning is significant in its potential to uncover grammatical universals. The fact that clusters of semantic properties may manifest themselves in dissimilar morphosyntactic formats across languages potentially obscures universal threads in the structure the human capacity for language. Research that investigates such divergences advances the state of the art in linguistic science by identifying hidden cross-linguistic uniformities relevant to both the theory of language and the study of human cognition broadly.

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