1 Introduction

North Sámi is known to have a rich inventory of derivational suffixes – suffixes that form verbs from nouns and adjectives or from other verbs, nouns from verbs, adjectives from nouns and verbs, to mention some main types. In this paper, I will take a closer look at one particular derivational suffix, the suffix /ʃ/, spelled š, which forms verbs from adjectives or nouns. More precisely, the suffix attaches to an adjective or noun and returns a transitive verb meaning ‘[subject] find [object] (too) ADJECTIVE/NOUN’.¹ A few examples are given in (1). Note that the verbs are given in the infinitive, with the infinitival suffix -it following the derivational suffix.²

In the standard descriptive grammars of North Sámi, Nielsen (1926: 263–264) and Nickel (1990: 292–293), these verbs are labelled sensive. This is then also the term that I will use here.

At first sight, it seems that the suffix /ʃ/ must be quite rich semantically, adding much meaning to the adjectival or nominal base. However, adopting a syntactic approach to morphologically complex words, as in Distributed Morphology (see, e.g., Halle and Marantz 1993; 1994; Halle 1997; Marantz 1997; Harley & Noyer 2000; Embick & Noyer 2007; Embick 2010), I will show that the meaning of the sensive verbs arises as a consequence of the combination of elements that are semantically quite simple. In particular, there is no specifically “sensive” suffix.

This paper is thus intended as a contribution to the long ongoing debate on the relation and the division of labour between the lexicon and the syntax. On one side in this debate there are approaches that are referred to as lexicalist, e.g. Levin & Rappaport Hovav (2005). What they have in common is the assumption that the lexicon contains grammatical information which to some degree determine the structures that the lexical items appear in. On the other side are approaches that might be called constructionist, e.g. Borer (2005a; 2005b; 2013) and Ramchand (2008), which all take the syntactic structure to be built first, in accordance with general principles, and the lexical items to be inserted later. The lexical items have to be compatible with the syntactic structure, but it does not have to be a structure that they routinely appear in. The present paper takes its position on the latter side.

More precisely, my analysis is formulated within the model known as Distributed Morphology. Distributed Morphology, or DM for short, is a syntax-based approach to word structure which has become quite influential over the years. It was introduced in Halle and Marantz (1993; 1994), and has later been further developed and refined in a number of works by several authors, such as e.g. McGinnis (1995); Halle (1997); Marantz (1997); Noyer (1998); Harley & Noyer (2000); Embick & Noyer (2007) and Embick (2010). Distributed Morphology takes syntactic structure to be built from abstract morphemes, consisting of morphosyntactic and semantic features only. These abstract morphemes are related to phonological features when the syntactic representation is handed over to spellout, where so-called vocabulary items, some corresponding to roots and others corresponding to (bundles of) functional features, are inserted in the syntactic terminal nodes.

The paper is organised as follows. In section 2 I present the main properties of North Sámi sensive verbs. I show that these verbs are transitive and stative and that they take an experiencer subject. In section 3 I identify the syntactic elements that the sensive verbs are built from: the root, the nominal or adjectival categorial head, the stative verbaliser and the Voice head. In section 4 I show how the semantic relations involved in the sensive verbs follow from the stativity of the verbaliser and from the syntax of the VoiceP as a whole. In section 5 I address the spelling out of the elements that make up the sensive verb, and I show that the vocabulary item that will give the verbaliser present in sensive verbs its phonological realisation as /ʃ/ is in fact less specified than one might think. It appears as the realisation of the verbaliser only in sensive verbs because in other contexts more specified vocabulary items win out. Section 6 sums up the paper.

2 The main properties of sensive verbs

I will start by presenting some sentences with sensive verbs, in order to show the main syntactic properties of these verbs. The verb in (2) is based on the adjective amas ‘strange, unfamiliar’, while the verb in (3) is based on the adjective headju ‘bad’ and the verb in (4) on the adjective jalla ‘stupid’.³

We see that the sensive verbs are transitive, and that they take an experiencer subject. The object is involved in the stimulus, but it is arguably not identical to the stimulus. Rather, the stimulus is a state that holds of the object or a property that the object has.

It can also be shown that the sensive verbs are stative. Magga (1986: 27) notices that in North Sámi, the progressive tense forces an evidential reading on stative verbs. We will first see how the progressive works with dynamic verbs. An example involving the verb geahččat ‘watch’ is given in (5). In (5a), the simple present tense is used, and the reading is generic. In (5b), by contrast, the same verb appears in the present progressive, and we get an episodic reading.⁴

With stative verbs, things are different. In (6a) the stative verb diehtit ‘know’ appears in the simple present tense. This gives rise to a regular present tense reading, where the speech time is inside the interval in which the state holds. If the present progressive is used instead, as in (6b), the temporal relations do not change. Instead, evidential modality is added, as the translation indicates.⁵

It turns out that a sensive verb in the progressive also receives an evidential reading. An example is given in (7).⁶

We thus have evidence that North Sámi sensive verbs are transitive stative verbs with experiencer subjects.

3 The building blocks of sensive verbs

We will start by noting that no content words appear as bare roots in North Sámi. Verbs, nouns and adjectives involve at least a theme vowel in addition to the root. In (8), I show how the roots barg-, čápp-, divr- and guhk- are dressed up when they appear as words of different categories (the final -t in the verb in (8a) and (8c) is the infinitival marker).

We see that the first syllable, the root itself, is the same across categories (modulo some regular alternations, see fn. 1), but the second syllable varies depending on the category. More generally, words of different categories can share a root in North Sámi, but these words are never formally identical. They are always differentiated by elements following the root. Thus, North Sámi appears to provide direct evidence that the roots themselves do not have a syntactic category, and that the category is supplied by a functional head that combines with the root – a v, n or a head (see e.g. Marantz 1997; Embick & Marantz 2008; Harley 2009, and also Borer 2003 for a related view). In North Sámi, the categorising elements are arguably always phonologically realised (see Julien 2015 for more data and discussion).

In the sensive verbs shown in (1) we see now that the whole adjective or noun is included in the verb, and not just the root. For example, in the sensive verb divrrašit ‘find expensive’, shown in (1b), we find the adjective divrras, and not just the root divr(r)-. In other words, sensive verbs are formed from roots that have already combined with categorising elements. More specifically, the morphology suggests that sensive verbs are built on an adjectival (aP) or nominal (nP) base (with some phonological adjustment, e.g. in headju ‘bad’ > hejošit (1c) and váivi ‘nuisance’ > váivvášit (1e)).

The sensive verbs can be compared to the so-called essive verbs, which are exemplified in (9). The verbs are shown together with corresponding adjectives or nouns, and the (realisations of) the verbalisers are boldfaced.

The essive verbs shown in (9) are intransitive. They take only one argument, as in the example in (10), where rievssatmuorjji lasttat ‘bearberry leaves’⁷ is the surface subject of ruoksát ‘appear red’.

Julien (2007) argued that in the essive verbs, the verbalisers attach directly to the (monosyllabic) roots, the same roots that are also found in the corresponding adjectives and nouns. The morphology indicates that this is the case, since no a or n seems to be represented in the verbs. The semantics of the essive verbs point in the same direction. Essive verbs corresponding to adjectives seem to predicate of their subject the property encoded in the adjective, but notably, essive verbs corresponding to nouns do not predicate of their subjects the corresponding noun. For example, whereas ruoksát in (9a) is compatible with the subject being red, ridnát in (9c) does not indicate that the subject is rime. Instead, it means that the subject is in a state which is characterised by what the root ridn- ‘rime’ means.

I conclude that essive verbs like those in (9) are not formed from adjectives and nouns, as the traditional grammar would have it. Instead, they are based on roots that are also found in adjectives and nouns. This means that the essive verbs involve a vP with the syntactic structure shown in (11). Here the root is combined with a stative verbaliser, v_BE (Folli & Harley 2007, Harley 2009), and the subject is introduced as the specifier of the verbaliser. In addition, I would argue that the root moves and adjoins to v_BE, so that a complex head is formed, but I leave this out in (11) in order to keep things simple.⁸

The meaning of the verbs follows from this structure. Although roots are assumed to have no syntactic category, they have conceptual content. This conceptual content becomes integrated in the meaning of the verb, so that the verb means ‘be in a state characterised by what the root means’. The fact that some roots also appear in adjectives while others appear in nouns is not relevant.

There are however a few essive verbs in North Sámi where a categorial marker is found inside verbaliser. Two examples are shown in (12):

The verbs in (12) are arguably built from nouns, that is, from roots that have combined with a n head. Hence, they involve the vP-structure shown in (13):

The presence of the categorial head n has morphological consequences – the noun can be identified inside the verb – and it also has semantic consequences. Marantz (1997) proposed that although roots can have special meanings in particular environments, the meaning becomes fixed when the categorial head is added. Arad (2003), developing the idea further, concluded that roots and words behave differently in word formation – where “word” is understood as a constituent that includes a category head. Whereas the environment may influence the interpretation of roots, a word “forces its semantic and phonological properties on any element derived from it” (Arad 2003: 737).⁹ This contrast is arguably also seen in the verbs under discussion here: the roots in the essive verbs in (9) have some semantic leeway, while in the essive verbs in (12), the meaning of the noun is retained in the verb.

Sensive verbs are similar to the essive verbs in (12) in certain respects. Firstly, as we have seen, the phonological reflex of the element that forms a noun or adjective from the root appears to be present also in the corresponding sensive verb, which means that these verbs contain predicates that are assigned a syntactic category. And again, the semantics corroborates what the morphology indicates. We see this most clearly in sensive verbs based on nouns, such as váivvášit in (1e), which is based on the noun váivi ‘nuisance’. Váivvášit means ‘find [object] a nuisance’, and not, for example, ‘think that [object] is annoyed’. Instead of attributing to the object a property associated with the root in a more vague fashion, the sensive verbs seem to involve adjectival or nominal predicates.

But unlike essive verbs, sensive verbs are transitive. They take an experiencer subject argument in addition to the argument that is the structural subject of the lower predicate. On my analysis, they involve the structure shown in (14).

Here the root is combined with a categorising element, an a or n, and the aP or nP is the complement of a stative verbaliser, v_BE. The structural subject of the stative verbaliser is introduced in Spec,vP. I represent it as OBJ, since it will end up as the object of the construction as a whole.

One might ask, though, if the object of the sensive verb could be an argument of the adjectival or nominal stem instead of being introduced by the verbaliser. This possibility cannot be completely excluded, as far as I can see, but on the other hand there are also arguments in favour of representing it as in (14). Firstly, the subject in (11) and (13) is introduced into the structure as the specifier of the stative verbaliser. If this is the case in essive verbs, it should be possible also in sensive verbs. Secondly, in cases where adjectives appear to have their own arguments, as in the small clauses in (15), the adjective either appears in the essive case, as in (15a) and (15b), or else it agrees with its structural subject in number and case, as in (15c).¹⁰

Adjectives inside sensive verbs have no case, and they do not agree with their structural subjects. This is seen clearly in (7), where the structural subject of the adjective is plural, but the adjective nevertheless shows up in the base form, which also is nominative singular. This is consistent with the sensive verbs containing an aP or nP but no other functional elements below the verbaliser, and it could also be taken as an indication that in the sensive verbs, there is not enough functional structure below the verbaliser to host an argument.

The experiencer subject, on my analysis, is the specifier of a Voice head that is merged above vP. (Again, I leave out head movement, which applies from the bottom up, so that the verb ends up at least as high as the Tense head. Note, by the way, that the structure shown here is in accordance with the claim in Harley 2009; 2013 that the external argument introducing head Voice is distinct from the verbaliser.) The sensive reading is, as we will see below, a consequence of adding an external argument to the stative structure. Above VoiceP there will be heads with inflectional features, such as tense and aspect, and also a CP-domain, but since these are the same in clauses with sensive verbs as in all other North Sámi clauses, I will not discuss them here.

4 The external argument, and the meaning of the whole thing

I will now turn to the question of how the meaning of the sensive verbs arises. The meaning of the sensive verb as a whole could be taken to suggest that a psychological verb is involved. We see this in the examples I have presented earlier, and also in the example in (16).

If we were to assume that a psychological verb is one of the building blocks of the North Sámi sensive verbs, we could plausibly analyse the suffix /ʃ/ (spelled š) as the phonological realisation of a verb meaning ‘consider, think’. However, as I will show in the following, there is no need to assume that there is a psychological verb contained in the sensive verbs. Instead, the “sensive” interpretation follows from the syntax.

The syntactic structure that I propose for North Sámi sensive verbs, which was shown in (14), is repeated in (17).

The claim that the surface subjects of sensive verbs are specifiers of Voice is supported by the fact that the verbs can be passivized. An example is shown in (18).

In this respect, the sensive verbs are like other transitive subject experiencer verbs in North Sámi. They are stative, and they allow passivisation. In (19) we see that the subject experiencer verb ráhkistit ‘love’ passes the test for stativity – it gets an evidential reading in the progressive, and in (20) we see that it can be passivised.¹¹

Neither of these two properties comes as a surprise. As Rothmayr (2009) demonstrates in much detail, and as others have observed before (e.g. Hale & Keyser 1997; Tenny 2000), subject experiencer verbs in general are stative. A notable exception pointed out by Pylkkänen (2000) is inchoatives, but in North Sámi (as in Finnish), inchoatives are marked as such morphologically. For example, the inchoative counterpart of ráhkistit ‘love’ is ráhkistuvvat ‘fall in love’, which is shown in (21).

An inchoative reading of (19) or (20) is out of the question, since the verbs do not have inchoative morphology, and consequently, only a stative reading is available.

The possibility of passivisation in its turn indicates that the experiencer subjects are truly external arguments. It is widely acknowledged that experiencer subjects can be external, also in the strictly syntactic sense that they are merged outside the minimal verb phrase. Kratzer (1996) suggested that the thematic role of the argument introduced by the Voice head depends on the properties of the predicate: if the predicate is dynamic, the external argument will be an agent, but if the predicate is stative, the external argument will be what Kratzer calls a “holder”, which must be taken to subsume experiencers. I conclude that experiencer subjects are specifiers of Voice (also) in North Sámi, and that the syntax of the sensive verbs is as shown in (17).¹²

One might still ask, though, if the external argument in a structure like (17) has to be interpreted as an experiencer. Pylkkänen (2000) showed that the subject of a stative psychological predicate can be a cause, as in the Finnish example in (22) (Pylkkänen’s example (1b)).

But note that the verb contains a causative element, which is why the external argument is interpreted as a causer.¹³ Causatives formed from psychological predicates, with the causer as the external argument, are also found in North Sámi. The examples in (23) demonstrate this, with the subject experiencer verb illudit ‘be happy; look forward to’ in (23a) and the corresponding causative illudahttit ‘make [someone] happy’, with the causer as subject and the experiencer as object, in (23b).¹⁴

There are however also verb pairs in North Sámi with the same contrast in the alignment of the arguments, but where the structural relation between the two verbs is less transparent. One such pair is ballat ‘fear’ and baldit ‘scare’. These two verbs are shown in (24ab).

We see here that ballat ‘fear’ takes an experiencer subject, while the stimulus appears in the locative case. Baldit ‘scare’, on the other hand, takes the stimulus/cause as subject and the experiencer as a direct object, but it is not overtly marked as causative. This is then evidence that in North Sámi, a psychological verb which is not morphologically causative can nevertheless take the cause as subject. But importantly, baldit ‘scare’ is specified in the lexicon as the realisation of a causative structure, corresponding to the non-causative ballat ‘fear’. This verb pair is exceptional in North Sámi, since in most cases where a non-causative verb has a causative counterpart, the causative verb is a morphological causative based on the non-causative verb (see e.g. Vinka 2002). Only a few verbs have causative counterparts that are not derived morphologically, but instead based on different roots. Another example is the causative boaldit ‘burn’, which corresponds to the intransitive buollit ‘burn’. But generally, if the base verb is not obligatorily causative, it can get a causative reading only if a causative marker is added. Thus, there are no labile verbs in North Sámi (Julien 2016). In the sensive verbs there is nothing that encodes causation, and consequently, they do not get a causative reading. The suffix /ʃ/ is not specified as causative, but instead as the realisation of a stative verbaliser. It follows that the external argument in (17) must be interpreted as an experiencer.

The interpretation of the sensive verb follows from the specification of /ʃ/ as the realisation of a stative verbaliser together with the structure of the verb phrase as a whole. In the lower part of the structure in (17), there is a state whose structural subject is the argument represented as OBJ. The state is thus clearly not predicated of the external argument. As we have already established, the external argument must be an experiencer. The subject matter or stimulus (there are many names for this thematic role) is then the embedded predicate, i.e. the state.¹⁵ In other words, the syntactic structure shown in (17) gives an interpretation according to which the external argument experiences that the state denoted by the complement of the verbaliser holds of the internal argument. This interpretation follows even though there is no element present that corresponds to the psychological verbs that necessarily appears in translations of North Sámi sensive verbs.¹⁶

As for the ‘excessive’ reading which tends to be associated with the sensive verbs, it should be noted that it is always optional – for example, divrrašit can be interpreted as ‘find expensive’ or ‘find too expensive’. The excessive reading arguably follows from a conversational implicature. After all, stating that something is expensive can readily be interpreted as a claim that it is too expensive. Hence, I do not think that the excessive element is actually encoded in the sensive verbs. It is just a matter of pragmatics.

5 Spelling out: the phonological realisation

A key assumption of Distributed Morphology (DM) is that the terminal nodes of the syntactic structure are abstract morphemes, consisting of morphosyntactic and semantic features only. These nodes are matched with vocabulary items at spellout. The vocabulary items contribute nothing but phonological features, but they are sensitive to the feature content of the node where they are to be inserted. They can also be sensitive to features of other nodes in the context, and, since vocabulary insertion proceeds from the bottom up, even to phonological properties of more deeply embedded constituents (see e.eg. Bobaljik 2000; Embick 2010; Arregi & Nevins 2013). Where more than one vocabulary item is a candidate for insertion in a given position, the item that matches the largest number of features at the insertion site will win. We will now see how this works in North Sámi sensive verbs. We will first, in 5.1, address the realisation of the root and the lower categorial head (an a or n head) that I have claimed to be present in the sensive verbs, whereas in 5.2 we look at the realisation of the verbaliser and the Voice head.

6 Summing up

In this paper, I have presented an analysis of a class of derived verbs found in North Sámi. These verbs, which are called sensive verbs in the grammars of the language, are formed by adding the suffix /ʃ/, spelled š, to an adjectival or nominal base. The resulting verbs are transitive, and their meaning can be given schematically as ‘[subject] find [object] (too) ADJECTIVE/NOUN’. This might give the impression that the sensive verbs contain an element meaning ‘find, consider, judge’, and that the suffix /ʃ/ is the phonological realisation of this element. In other words, the sensive verbs could be seen as the combination of a noun or adjective with a psychological verb. On my analysis, however, there is no such verb present in the sensive verbs.

My analysis starts with a syntactic deconstruction of the verb phrase contained in sensive verbs. I show that from a syntactic point of view, the sensive verbs consist of a root, an adjectival or nominal categorial head, a stative verbaliser, and a Voice head. The object is the specifier of the verbaliser whereas the subject is the specifier of Voice. I then argue that the semantic properties of the sensive verbs follow from this structure. In the lower part of the structure, the object of the verb as a whole is the subject of the predicate made up of the stative verbaliser and the aP or nP. Adding a Voice head and an external argument to this structure forces the external argument to be interpreted as an experiencer. The stimulus must then be the state that holds of the internal argument.

Following the syntactic and semantic analysis I address the phonological realisations of the elements that make up the sensive verbs. I note that the realisation of the adjectival or nominal categorial head is in many cases conditioned by the root. The realisation of the stative verbaliser which is present in the sensive verbs can however not be conditioned by the root, since there is another categorial head intervening between the root and the verbaliser. As a consequence, the suffix /ʃ/, which is characteristic of the sensive verbs, only needs to be specified as the realisation of a stative verbaliser in a transitive structure. This will ensure that the verbaliser in the sensive verbs is spelled out as /ʃ/, as more specified vocabulary items will not have their specifications met.

The essence of my analysis is that the interpretation of sensive verbs, ‘[subject] find [object] (too) ADJECTIVE/NOUN’, arises from a syntactic structure made up of elements that have only grammatical features – category features, stativity, etc. The only element with rich semantic content is the root at the very bottom. Importantly, there is no psychological verb involved in building up the sensive verbs. This demonstrates how meaning can be seen as a consequence of structure, a view which opposes the more traditional view according to which properties of the lexical elements themselves to a large degree determine the syntactic structures that they appear in.

Abbreviations

ACC = accusative, ATTR = attributive, CAUS = causative, COMP = comparative, COND = conditional, ESS = essive, GEN = genitive, INCH = inchoative, INF = infinitive, LOC = locative, NEG = negation, NOM = nominative, OBJ = object, PART = partitive, PASS = passive, PL = plural, PRES = present, PROG = progressive, PTC = participle, SENS = sensive, SG = singular, STAT = stative, SUBJ = subject.

Competing interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.