The semantics of the Amharic verb alə ‘say’ as an auxiliary:

A grammaticalization approach

Abstract

Contemporary Amharic has three verbal forms: alǝ ‘say,’ al(ǝ) ‘aux’, and –al ‘infl’ sharing phonological similarity and the same semantic origin. Previous literature, however, treats them as if they are independent of each other in forms and meanings. On the contrary, this study presents an alternative description treating the three forms as interrelated based on converging evidence, following a grammaticalization process and collecting 43 sets of data from various written sources as a result the study identified the auxiliary al’s and its grammaticalized meanings; introducing single and double words and expressing subjectivity to independent clauses it introduced. As a single-word introducer, the auxiliary alǝ provided meanings such as valency changer, modal auxiliary, expressive marker, verbalizer (light verb) and enclitic word introducer; as a double words introducer the entire construction provided figurative meanings and as a linker of two clauses al(ǝ) ‘aux’ gave subjectivity readings to the entire event encoded by the construction.