Where does that fit in? Morphological variation and reanalysis in Georgian placeholder verbs

Abstract

The placeholder verb construction, which has emerged relatively recently in colloquial Georgian, offers a unique case study of grammaticalization in progress: the emergence of a structurally innovative type of verb within a language whose verbal morphology is already quite complex. Derived from reanalysis of the event-anaphoric verb phrase ‘do that,’ placeholder verbs exhibit morphological variability which is quite uncharacteristic for the language. We advance a few structural analyses to account for this variation, differing primarily in how the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’ has been reanalyzed: as an incorporated theme; as a functional head of an extant category; as a novel functional head; or a sort of anaphor for a subword morphological constituent. Each analysis accounts for a different subset of the attested patterns, so we hypothesize that multiple grammars of the construction coexist across speakers. Theoretically, this is reasonable state of affairs, since the reanalyzed demonstrative has no unambiguous structural analogue in the standard Georgian verb. Empirically, evidence for the multiple-grammars hypothesis comes from a morphological acceptability study. Participants cluster into two major groups, whose judgement patterns correspond well to predictions of the extant-functional-head and morphological-anaphor analyses. We speculate on why our participants seem not to instantiate the other proposed placeholder-verb grammars, positing certain language-specific and language-general analytical biases relevant to the acquisition of this emergent construction.