Reduplication of the non-finite form called the verb genitive in North Saami

Abstract

The goal of this article is to account for a linguistic phenomenon in North Saami, namely the appearance of two identical verb genitive forms, one right after the other, in a clause, such as boađi boađi ‘just about to come’ and bosu bosu ‘huffing and puffing’. I call this the reduplicated verb genitive. The reduplicated verb genitive in North Saami has until now not received much attention in the scholarly literature, so the goal of this article is to present a preliminary overview, addressing how two verb genitive forms of the same verb that follow one another function semantically and morphologically, and what the syntactic function of the construction is. The research is based on examples from literary works, the SIKOR Saami text corpus belonging to UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the Norwegian Saami Parliament, Finnish interview archives (KOTUS, SKA and TKU), and the internet. This material was analyzed semantically, morphologically, and syntactically. In addition the frequency of the verb genitive was investigated and determined.

The main finding of this research was that the reduplicated verb genitive in North Saami expresses two different semantic values. The first meaning is proximative, which expresses something that is about to be achieved, as in Čakča lea boađi boađi ‘Autumn is just about to arrive’. The second meaning is the intensive verb genitive, as in Ánte boahtá bosu bosu ‘Ánte is coming huffing and puffing’. In the data the proximative verb genitive is almost always formed from the verb boahtit ‘come’ > boađi boađi ‘just about to come’, whereas the intensive verb genitive can be formed from various verbs that express movement (like doapmat ‘rush’) or sound (like bossut ‘blow, puff’). The syntactic function of the intensive verb genitive is usually as an adverbial modifier of the verb, as a predicative with a copular verb, or as an attribute, and in addition in some clauses it can be the sole verbal core. In the data the reduplicated verb genitive is formed only from bisyllabic verbs.