Nominalized past participles

Nominalized past participles are defective nouns that are the most deviant noun type.¹⁴ All nouns of this category are derived from verbs and function like a

11A blank cell in the table means that no certain information is available. In contrast, a hyphen (in the Meaning column) means that speakers state that there is no associated meaning with a name.

12The superscripted^Dafter the gender means that the name has a counterpart in the opposite sex: Mandzoué (F) > Mandzong (M), Mba (M) > Mimba (F), Mímbɛ̂ (F) > Mìmbɛ̂ (M), Nanze (F)

> Nze (M), Nandtoungou (F) > Toungou (M), Tsimbo (F) > Batsimbo (M).

13The orthography is provided by different Mabi speakers since the Gyeli speakers are mostly illiterate.

14Their category label does not imply that there are non-nominalized participles.

Table 3.5: Examples of Gyeli proper names (in local orthography)

Name Gender Languages Meaning

Ada M, F Gyeli, Kwasio, Fang, Bulu –

Bibanga F Gyeli, Kwasio, Fang –

Bikanda M, F

Biyang M Gyeli, Kwasio remedy

Bouolpuma M Gyeli rotten breadfruit

Bwedila M Gyeli, Kwasio –

Kimpile F

Luonga F Gyeli, Kwasio group

Mabalé M Gyeli, Kwasio

Mambi M Gyeli behavior

Mandzoué F^D

Manligui F

Mba M^D Gyeli rank

Mbiambo F Gyeli plenty

Mimbanji M Gyeli arbalest, crossbow

Mímbê F^D Gyeli, Basaa, Bulu –

Minlar M Gyeli union

Nalingui F Gyeli, Kwasio –

Nanze F^D Gyeli, Kwasio, Bulu, Basaa panther

Nandtoungou F^D Gyeli, Kwasio –

Nashuong F Gyeli young palm heart?

Ngolo F Gyeli, Kwasio –

Ngo Minsem F Gyeli, Basaa daughter of Minsem

Nguiamba M

Ngusa M Gyeli, Basaa –

Nziwu M Gyeli, Kwasio Great antelope

Sedyua M Gyeli, Kwasio derived from civet?

Tsimbo F^D Gyeli, Kwasio outcast

past participle, as illustrated in (3). More information on the derivation process

‘It is hung up [lit. a hung-up person/thing].’

Unlike full nouns, nominalized past participles never allow a plural form. Thus, while the nominal predicate in (4a) takes the plural noun class markerba-, agree-ing in number with the subject, this is not the case for the nominalized past participle in (4b).

‘Ada and Mambi are teachers.’

b. Àdà

‘Ada and Mambi are married [lit. are married ones].’

The occurrence of nominalized past participles is restricted to the predicate position of a stamp copula construction (§3.9.1), as shown in (3) and (4). Con-sequently, they do not serve as an argument or adjunct, unlike common nouns and proper names. Given their distributional restriction, they never occur in a position where they would trigger agreement, for instance through the addition of agreement targets in the predicate np. Likewise, speakers would not replace the nominalized past participle with a pronoun that could indicate its affiliation with an agreement class.

Another hypothesis would be to consider these forms as verbs, given their ver-bal stem and translation. Despite significant differences from common nouns and proper names, I do not adopt this analysis, but instead classify nominalized past participles as a defective noun type. Evidence for this comes from their prefixa-tion and tonal behavior, and their distribuprefixa-tion in sentences which distinguishes them from verbs. Morphologically, verbs do not take prefixes, but only suffixes.

The nominalized past participle, however, consistently takes a nasal prefix. Verbs only have tonal specifications for the first syllable while the potential second and third syllables are underlyingly toneless and thus surface as L in isolation, as ex-plained in §2.4. In contrast, nominalized past participles never surface L on the

last syllables, but either H or HL. Also in terms of their distribution in sentences, nominalized past participle forms cannot be verbs since verbs follow the subject-tense-aspect-mood-polarity (stamp) marker, as described in §3.9.1. These partici-ples cannot combine with the stamp marker. They only occur in stamp copula constructions (§7.1.1). There are several predication types for copula construc-tions, including nominal and adjectival copulas, but never verbs. (5) contrasts a nominalized past participle with a passive construction in (5b), as the translation of the nominalized past participle construction might suggest a passive reading.

(5) a. ndáwɔ̀

‘The house is destroyed (by fire).’

b. ndáwɔ̀

‘The house is being destroyed by fire.’

The nominalized past participle and the passive construction both allow for an instrumental oblique. The form of the stamp copula in (5a) and the stamp marker in (5b) are, however, distinct, as is the participle form with its nasal and its tonal pattern in which it differs from the verbal form in the passive.

While the passive and the nominalized past participle are two distinct cate-gories, both categories are, however, linked semantically and formally. In terms of semantics, their subjects are the undergoer of an action while the agent would appear in an adjunct or not at all. This is true for both categories, but since the nominalized past participle is more about the result, the agent is mentioned very rarely.

Formally, both categories take a suffix -a. There are two possibilities to ana-lyze -awith respect to the different categories. Either, one could posit that it is the same suffix which just takes different tonal patterns in different categories.

Or one could assume two different suffixes -a, which each come with their own tonal patterns for the passive and the nominalized past participle. I choose the second option, as reflected in the glosses. The reason for this is not only the dif-ferent tone patterns associated with the difdif-ferent suffixes, but also a (synchron-ically) insufficient link between the two categories. Thus, glossing both suffixes -aas passive (and assuming that nominalization is primarily encoded through the nasal prefix in the nominalized past participle) presupposes a derivation chain with passivization as a necessary step. This assumption is, however, not justified

since many verbs with a nominalized past participle form lack a passive form:

only 105 (27%) verbs take a passive form, but 325 (86%) have a nominalized past participle form.