Analysis to Synthesis: The Development of Complex Verb Morphology in the Dravidian Languages.

• Author: Zvelebil, Kamil V.

It is a great pleasure to review a book on Dravidian (Dr.) linguistics that is highly original, thought-provoking, witty and, what is more, marks a great advance in the development of the subject. Its author sets out to analyze the genesis of synthetic verb forms in the Dr. languages through the process of compound verb contraction. He has succeeded in showing very convincingly that contraction provides the best and the most economic explanation of the development of synthetic verb forms from analytic forms, by creating a paradigm of historical evolution that utilizes formal and functional attributes of both earlier and later forms.

The first chapter, entitled simply "The Dravidian Languages," is, in a way, the most important one from a general point of view. A reader who would he unwilling to immerse himself in the details of the complexities of Kui, Pengo, Konda, Tamil (chs. 2, 3, 4, and 6), and of the plural action verb (ch. 5) should read the introductory chapter, together with the conclusions (ch. 7), to derive sufficient information about the process of "analysis to synthesis," gaining in addition a real intellectual delight from Steever's manner of arguing and presentation. Let me quote what I consider a most important paragraph (p. 4):

I here propose a historical analysis to bridge these two divergent views of Dravidian verb morphology, namely, the simple and the complex, the analytic and the synthetic. Rather than abandon one analysis or the other, both are reconciled through appeal to the process of Compound Verb Contraction, or simply Contraction, a morphosyntactic process which applies to compound verb constructions and involves a fusing of the main and the auxiliary verbs into a simple word. I argue that Dravidian morphology is fundamentally simple, and demonstrate that Contraction is the process responsible for the historical transformation of analytic forms into relatively more synthetic ones.

Steever goes on to give descriptive and historical background for the world's fourth-largest language family (indeed, a number of non-literary languages, like Kurumba, could he added to his "twenty-four" on p. 4), deals with the four branches of Dr. which represent bundles of isoglosses that demarcate shared innovations and retentions of linguistic features, accepting Krishnamurti's 1978 subgrouping,(1) and on pp. 7-9 describes briefly the four branches (South Dr., South-Central Dr., Central Dr. and North Dr., suggesting, quite correctly, that Brahui "might well constitute a separate subgroup, the first to branch away from Proto-Dravidian," an opinion expressed years ago by Andronov). Moreover,". . . the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages have influenced each other so extensively that a linguistic area has arisen on the subcontinent" (as demonstrated by M. B. Emeneau and Colin Masica).

The core of this introductory chapter is formed by two subdivisions, on "linguistic features of Dravidian" (pp. 11-23) and on "compound verb contraction" (pp. 23-34, with notes). One can only admire Steever's gift of clear and simple formulation of fundamental facts and the basic and most characteristic traits (when, e.g., he deals with the basic distinction...