A complex system of complex predicates: tense, taxis, aspect and mood in Basse Mandinka from a grammaticalisation and cognitive perspective

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The present work analyses the Basse Mandinka tense-taxis-aspect-mood verbal system withinthe framework of cognitive and grammaticalisation linguistics and from the perspective ofcomplexity theory.The author builds his study by pursuing the following more specific – gradually moremacroscopic and systematic – objectives: (a) a description of the entire semantic potential ofall the Basse Mandinka verbal grams; (b) a representation of the synchronic inventories ofsenses of each Basse Mandinka verbal construction as a coherent phenomenon, i.e. as akinetic qualitative map ordered by means of grammaticalisation templates or paths; (c) anintroduction of the information concerning the prototypicality of the map and thedevelopment of a bi-dimensional representation of the meaning as a wave; (d) a constructionof streams that contain gram-waves organised along similar evolutionary templates; and (e) amodelling of the entire Basse Mandinka verbal organisation into a system of currents. Thissystem – visualised as an ocean – is demonstrated to have characteristics typical to complexbodies: it is open, situated, fuzzy, full of unstable individuals, highly cardinal, uncontrollable,dynamic, metastable, past dependant, nonlinear, sensitive to initial conditions,deterministically chaotic in some regions, non-additive, non-resultant, but containingemergent properties, structurally intricate, self-organising and characterised by top-downcausation and bottom-up causation. Additionally, as far as its methodological properties areconcerned, the representation is incomplete, provisional and pluralistic in agreement withmodels of real-world complexity.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University