W. Jansen

Esperanto parts of speech in functional discourse grammar

Abstract Esperanto is a constructed or planned language which is actively used by a multifaceted speech community all over the world. For more than a century, the nature of the parts-of-speech (PoS) system of Esperanto has been an item of controversy among its grammarians. Based on a study of the language as it is actually used by its speech community and supported by historical and contemporary documents, the author argues that the languages current PoS system can be described adequately as a mixture of contentive lexemes and verbally specialized lexemes. A system of contentive lexemes, which allows the user to create four different words with predictable meanings out of each single root of any semantic category without having to use derivational tools, does justice to the learnability claim which underlies the structure of this language, which was made to be easy. The increasing number of verbally specialized lexemes is a development which is known to, but unsatisfactorily explained by many esperantologists. The paper develops the hypothesis that the diachrony of Esperanto (constructed in its origin, but freely developing) provides support to the claim that natural languages can be classified in terms of an implicational hierarchy of their PoS systems, in which verbal specialization precedes all other forms of syntactic specialization of lexemes. The analysis is done within the framework of functional discourse grammar.

Derivation in the lexicon: the case of Esperanto

Abstract This study takes Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) as its theoretical framework, and applies to the phenomena under study the FDG terminology, which may differ from what many readers are used to. Esperanto has an agglutinating morphology. Its words are built on stems which are associated with contentive lexemes in a flexible system of parts of speech. The language has an elaborate stock of lexically dependent morphemes (roots in FDG) for lexeme building. Many basic words are stem-root combinations in Esperanto. The roots applied in them also appear in complex structures, and can be reordered and interchanged easily to produce different complex stems. For this reason, derivation is taken to be hosted in the lexicon. The lexicon must contain a highly developed procedural knowledge component, of which the derivation system is assumed to be a part. Some of the suffixable roots have homonymous variants that define grammatical processes. The combinatorial freedom of roots provides for a lexical expansion tool which is easy to handle, but not without complications. Problematic is the (in)transitivity of lexemes destined to verbal encoding, when applied in an environment that is not naturally theirs. This phenomenon is known to be an important source of mistakes among speakers of the language. It is argued that the lexicon of Esperanto speakers contains paired transitive and intransitive representations of the most current lexemes of this category. The study aims at providing support to better understand the mechanisms at work inside the lexicon and at the interface between the lexicon and the grammar of agglutinating languages.

Esperanto: een taal van mij, een taal om van te houden = Esperanto: lingvo malfremda, lingvo amida

Onderstaande tekst vormt de artikelversie van mijn op 4 september 2009 gehouden oratie bij de aanvaarding van het bijzonder hoogleraarschap in de interlinguistiek en het Esperanto aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam (Jansen, 2009). Ten opzichte van de oorspronkelijke oratie is de nu volgende tekst op enkele punten verbeterd en uitgebreid met referenties die voor de lezer nuttig kunnen zijn.