Italian change of state verbs make it easier to learn the language :)

After taking a year of Italian and studying in Florence last spring, I immediately became interested in the parts of the readings that discussed Italian and compared it with other languages.

In Haspelmath’s reading, the author writes that in Italian, stem suppleton’s can be phonologically conditioned. The verb andare ‘go’ has the stem and- when the stress is on a suffix, but va- when the stress is on the stem: vád-o ‘I go’, va-i ‘you go’, va ‘s/he goes’, and-iámo ‘we go’, and-áte ‘you(PL) go’, vá-nno ‘they go.’ This interested me because as Haspelmath writes earlier in the reading, this kind of adjustment is helpful for facilitating pronunciation. An alternative conjugation that would read ‘ando’ or ‘andai’  or ‘vamo’ are indeed harder to say. I simply never thought of it that way.

I had a hunch that Italian would be a V-language, and was happy when my hunch was confirmed after reading “The Many Ways to Search for a Frog.” I was particularly intrigued by the Italian description for the owl coming out of the hole: ‘from that tree exits an owl.’ The author writes that “perhaps the most salient characteristic of V-languages is the preference to mark a change of state with a verb, rather than by some other device.” It’s interesting to me that manner wasn’t added to the event because in Italian there isn’t a compact way to construct that a) the owl suddenly appeared b) it changed boundaries and c) it flew. Since I’ve only completed a year of Italian, I don’t have an extensive vocabulary in the language, and it’s comforting to me to know that I don’t necessarily have to since a) b) and c) can be encoded with a simple verb like “exit.”

In the Atkins-Levin reading, another example of Italian using a verb to mark a change of state was given: arrossire (to blush). The S-language Dutch uses a verb which describes the state of blushing rather than the change of state: blozen.  This is another example of encoding in Italian, interestingly due to the verb being associated with the auxiliary ‘be.’

Ultimately, I’m delighted that linguistics has illuminated the nuances of the Italian language. It’s a relatively simple, easy-to-learn language very much due to the encoding that happens with change of state verbs.