Tigrinya Applicatives in Lexical-Functional Grammar by Nazareth Amlesom

Tigrinya Applicatives in Lexical-Functional Grammar, a 2011 PhD Thesis by Nazareth Amlesom, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies University of Bergen

Part of the Abstract:

The primary goal of this thesis is to describe and analyze applicative constructions in Tigrinya. An applicative construction is characterized by a verb that bears an affix for an argument that either has a semantic role that is not normally entailed by the lexical meaning of the base verb or is specified as a peripheral argument. The choice of an applicative expression is motivated by semantic and discourse factors. Applicatively expressed arguments are associated with referents that possess high semantic prominence and discourse salience. The applicative phenomenon is viewed as a morphosyntactic strategy that introduces a core object function that is salient in the discourse event described by the verb. The theoretical motivation of this study is to explore the conditions that trigger object marking in Tigrinya so as to examine the semantic, functional and discourse properties of objects. The main theoretical framework used in this research is Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). This formalism assumes that the different linguistic information pertaining to functional, semantic and discourse structures can be modeled as interrelated parallel representations.

https://bora.uib.no/bitstream/handle/1956/5730/42478%20Nazareth%20Kifle%20materie.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y