IL CONTRIBUTO DEI MISSIONARI ALLA CLASSIFICAZIONE DEI VERBI IN TAMIL

Author(s)
Date Issued
2021
Type
bookPart
Start Page
1073
End Page
1087
Abstract
Tamil verbs are distinguished into seven or thirteen different classes based on the morphophonemic alternations determined by the internal sandhi which occurs in the suffixation of the past tense morpheme to the verb base. Furthermore, certain Tamil verb stems are derived rather than simple: they are formed by the verb root plus a voice morpheme which gives rise to the so-termed paired verbs. According to Paramasivam (1979), 60% of Tamil verbs, transitive and intransitive, present this alternation between two voices which the author defines as ‘affective’ and ‘effective’ voice. How did missionaries deal with these characteristics of Tamil verbs in their missionary grammars? How did they describe them throughout the application of the Latin grammatical framework? These are some of the questions this paper aims to answer focusing on the description of verb conjugations in missionary grammars composed between the second half of the 16th cent. and the first half of the 18th cent.
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